Insurance Emporium for Pets

fc94

How is it actually legal for an insurance company to withdraw health cover on renewal for newly diagnosed conditions when the whole idea of paying the premiums is to pay for unexpected health issues so long as the policy is live and continuous.
Further, as a dis-incentive to renew the insurer increases the premium by an astronomical amount. 
The policy holder is blackmailed for if they go to a new insurer, that insurer will not cover pre-existing conditions. 
Insurance companies are not regulated enough so they can take total advantage of the way the system is structured. 

DullGreyGuy

fc94 said:

How is it actually legal for an insurance company to withdraw health cover on renewal for newly diagnosed conditions when the whole idea of paying the premiums is to pay for unexpected health issues so long as the policy is live and continuous.
Further, as a dis-incentive to renew the insurer increases the premium by an astronomical amount. 
The policy holder is blackmailed for if they go to a new insurer, that insurer will not cover pre-existing conditions. 
Insurance companies are not regulated enough so they can take total advantage of the way the system is structured. 

A policy is typically 12 months and not continuous. Some health insurance (pet or otherwise) will have terms that span multiple policy years whereas more budget ones wont...

Cheap - pay up to £5,000 in the policy year of a condition and nothing thereafter
Medium - pay up to £5,000 spread over multiple policy years and nothing after thats exhausted
Expensive - pay up to £5,000 each policy year

As to pricing, this reflects the likely claims experience and so inevitably those that have made claims will pay higher premiums, this is almost universal in all classes of insurance. There are a minority (eg PetPlan) who explicitly exclude claims experience from their pricing but their average premium is much higher than average for a pet thats made no claims. 

fc94

Thank you for your note. In fact the company sent the exclusion letter 'in error'. No insurance company can cherry pick what it would like to remove in terms of cover if the cover is already in place. 

DullGreyGuy

Just take a look at all the posts on here from people paying into PPI/ASU policies for years prior to Covid to find that their policies were not renewed or were renewed at 5x or more what they were paying before. 

This is the risk of buying short term insurance, for human policies there are long term classes of insurance like permanent health for which the insurer cannot cancel the policy etc other than for fraud or non-payment but short term like Pet there are always risks.