Insurance - when does opacity become plain misleading?

The_No

So we have a pet insurance policy with Animal Friends that looks like it was a waste of money all these years. It was a monthly policy - which was a simple mistake on our part cos we thought that meant we were paying monthly for an annual policy. After all, it cost the same.

Now, I should say at the top that this is because we weren't paying attention to the terms, and never changed it when we should have, and basically the fact we now find ourselves massively out of pocket is because we didn't look closely at what we were paying for. Lesson learned.

However, we have been continuing to pay for a policy that the insurer no longer offers - indeed I don't know how long ago it stopped offering this policy.

There is no trace of what cover it provides on their website. A Google search for the policy and the insurer's name reveals nothing.

From this it is fair to assume the policy was not supported any more.

And yet they continued to rake in premiums that were actually higher than the newer, better policies they *do* still offer would have cost. They did not go to any length (the way, say, I am used to with other financial services) to suggest that we could get better value. They just hoped that we wouldn't notice. And thanks to our complacency they succeeded.

They make a great play of being an ethical company - and as this is
not especially ethical behaviour by anyone's metrics - does anyone think it might be worth approaching them about the fact that we have been overcharged for a worthless policy all these months. Or do we simply have to eat it up?

rs65

Just because a policy isn't available for new customers doesn't mean it can't still apply to existing policyholders.

Who is the insurer?

The_No

Thanks for your reply, rs65. Insurer is Animal Friends.

Sure, old policies still apply. But when they are really poor value compared to other offerings, yet there's no way to compare/contrast due to info being stripped from website - and then premium still keeps rising out of whack with other policies - that is a little bit dirty, no?

rs65

Animal friends probably isn't the insurer. The current insurer is Red Sands.

Do you have a policy booklet to compare/contrast with their current offering?

The_No

I've seen what they currently offer and our premium would buy us coverage far more substantial than what we get.

Our policy is dubbed 'standard silver', and in the last bit of literature they sent us there was a chart of what the different policies included, cover-wise. But this chart didn't include the details about the amount of time we were covered for, which is where we're scuppered.

As I said before, we always assumed that the monthly in the monthly package referred to the payments - cos who would insure a pet month-by-month? We certainly didn't intend to. But we've lived with that for years, it turns out.

However, now that there's no information online, and only very meagre info is sent to us - AND, in the absence of any info about our exact policy online, it is easy to confuse what we're paying for with something a little more substantial.

I think this misunderstanding is why we are where we are. And I wonder if Animal Friends might have been a little clearer about the distinctions.