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Insurance can be a very complex
subject, and is not unheard of for a policy to run to more than 20
pages of closely typed and, for the most part, difficult to
understand terms and conditions. We buy insurance for those
occasions when things go wrong, so that we have a financial lifeline
to fall back on, and the consequences of being under insured or,
even worse, not insured at all when disaster strikes can be very,
serious indeed. Despite this the average person in Britain has
never, ever read all the way through a single insurance policy, and
the majority of policies are bought using one criteria only; Price!
This obsession with buying the cheapest possible
insurance has led to the growth of a whole new industry; price
comparison websites. These encourage their visitors to search for
the lowest possible price for a very complex financial instrument,
as though it was a mere commodity like a washing machine or a bar of
soap. Worse still, some of these sites are owned by insurance
companies or brokers, who can hardly be considered impartial, and
some of them even recommend insurers who are based outside the UK,
and are not subject to the normal checks and balances that UK
companies are regulated by. Many of them claim to search through
hundreds of prices for insurance policies in order to find the
cheapest one, despite the fact that there are only a few dozen
insurance companies in the UK! Finally, a search for, for example,
Insurance through 10 different price comparison sites, entering
exactly the same criteria, invariably throws up different companies
which are claimed to be the cheapest, and sometimes gives different
prices for the same company! Never has the phrase caveat emptor (let
the buyer beware) been so relevant.
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