MSE News: Insurance costs to soar as gender discrimination banned

cogito

The only winners in this will be the insurers. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.

musicmaker29

Its called equality, you either want it or you don't. You can't pick and choose - 'oh we'll have employment equality - but not insurance equality, pick and mix for me please'.

If I were to statistically prove that a man were better at a certain job than a woman then do you consider that I should only recruit men to that job? or maybe recruit both sexes but pay men twice as much?......say mining coal, or cutting down trees.

or perhaps you would say that gender has nothing to do with it and actually individual CHOICES and merits should be taken into consideration.....?

musicmaker29

cogito wrote: »

The only winners in this will be the insurers. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.

i think you may be right there!

exup

lisyloo wrote: »

We can't afford to judge every driver individually, neitehr can we afford to assess every claim fairly either sow e settle for least cost. That makes it an unfair basis for judging premiums.

Why can't every driver be assessed by their insurance company individually? There are files kept on peoples driving records - in fact most times you phone up companies and just give your house number and postcode and they tell you your own details. Of course a new driver hasn't built up this background, but a more experienced driver will have done - as someone who has built up a mass of information on motorbikes and cars, have always made damn sure that every one of my vehicles was covered by all the relevant paperwork I don't see why my premium should still be loaded even higher than my friend who has, time and again, shown he is a greater liability - claimwise then I am.

This ruling on the basis of sexism is crasy, young men are the main ones who are having the serious accidents. Maybe young women have accidents too, a minor dent here, cracked bumper there - but a written off Corsa, carrying four occupants, which has probably overturned a few times, taking out perhaps a lamp post and other vehicles on the way costs a hell of a lot more money than a little ding.
Young girls (15 -19) are still more likely to be killed by their boyfriends driving than anything else.

lisyloo

it still doesn't explain differences in car issuance claims or life expectancy.

Prices are based on statistics which show what actually happened, they are not based on anyone's theories.

There may well be some biological influence on life expectancy, but you can't attribute the entire difference to this factor

I don't think any insurer works on gender alone.
It's one of a number of factors.
With car insurance (for example) age is a much bigger differentiator than gender.

huckster

No point debating whether the courts decision is right or wrong, as it will be binding on Insurers whether people like it not.

As cogito summises the Insurers will look to take advantage of this decision to have a full review. I would be surprised if they did not take the opportunity to increase premiums across the board. So it will not just affect women.

The fact is that due to number of reasons, the Insurance industry is no longer as profitable as it once was. You only have to study some of the recent financial results to realise that. E.g. RBS Insurance paying out as much in claims, as they received in premiums during 2010.

Underwriter

cogito wrote: »

The only winners in this will be the insurers. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.

Oh really? How exactly?

Please note the insurance industry has been lobbying against this insane ruling and in fact when the gender directive first came out in 2004 we successfully got an exemption (or derogation as they call it) so we could carry on charging statistically verifiable and justified premiums.

Do you not think, and everyone else who takes the "insurance companies will be making bigger profits" line, that if that were the case we wouldn't have done any of this lobbying? Even now we are still reeling in disbelief that such a ridiculous state of affairs has been allowed to go so far. None of the pricing actuaries where I work has been jumping up and down with joy at the thought of increased profit.

If it wasn't statistically justified that men should be charged higher premiums, do you not think that in the highly competitive motor insurance market, that insurers would have been able to sustain artifically raised premiums?

Or is it some kind of consipiracy do you think (bearing anti competition rules in mind where we are not allowed to price fix, even if we wanted to, which we don't).

It really beggars belief that people think insurance pricing is done like that.

Now we face a situation where those who claim less (women for life and motor insurance and men for health insurance) are going to be paying more, and if as a result they stop buying insurance because of that and we are only left with the higher risk groups, there will be no cross subsidy from the lower risk pool and premiums will spiral. This is not just my opinion, the ABI put forward a paper to the ECJ on this subject.

So even you blokes who are crowing about women having to pay unwarranted and unjustified extra premiums on their car insurance WILL end up paying more on the back of this. If women decide to drive uninsured then premiums will end up escalating yet again.

I've been following news items as they get released and it would seem that the vast majority of people can see the lack of common sense in this ruling, then going by the comments on various articles there is a small minority of men who are only focussing on car insurance and believe that they are brilliant drivers and shouldn't have to be "penalised" for the rest of their gender (because of course one person's personal experience and opinion of their own driving outweighs thousand of claims worth of data and highly qualified actuarial calculations), and an even smaller minority who trot out the "insurance companies are rubbing their hands together in glee at the thought of those increased profits" line.

plumber2009

About Time this happened.

A women driver has statisticly the same chance of being involved in an accident as a man does.

Equal rights have to work both ways.

lisyloo

You know the thing I'm most gutted about.
The loss of those sheilas wheels adverts, that's undoubtedly the real loss to mankind here.

bert&ernie

lisyloo wrote: »

Prices are based on statistics which show what actually happened, they are not based on anyone's theories.



I don't think any insurer works on gender alone.
It's one of a number of factors.
With car insurance (for example) age is a much bigger differentiator than gender.

Thanks, I'm well aware of what the statistics show. Why did you bother to post your own little biological determinism theory?

Age is probably more important than gender in car insurance, but the fact is that premiums can currently be significantly loaded by gender in many forms of insurance. I was questioning the assertion that any of this is biologically determined by a persons sex.

Incidentally, age is also a protected characteristic in equality law. The argument for not outlawing age discrimination in insurance is that age changes through out a persons life and any differences in insurance pricing could be both positive or negative meaning that you are not intrinsically disadvantaged as an individual.