And if you want to comparison shop—you’ll have to go to other agents, fill out more forms containing the same information over and over. Even getting quotes on different plans from the same company often requires specifically requesting each one through an agent.
This is insane.
It’s not insane. It’s a cleverly designed system from which the insurance company that set up the system profits.
I suspect at this point it’s mostly inertia acting functionally like a cabal. There was a time when the best way to get a quote would have been to talk to an agent who would then do COMPLICATED MATH you could not comprehend and return a number to you. This is no longer the case, but apparently no one thought it would be profitable or worthwhile to go all-transparent or make insurers’ methods and rates public. So we keep doing it the old way.
That’s why I suspect the consumer side is the place to fix this. We have the means to acquire and publish the data, but it requires a certain level of time investment and coordination.
It’s not insane. It’s a cleverly designed system from which the insurance company that set up the system profits.
That sounds like an implausible amount of coordination amongst insurance companies, especially on the level of agents.
I suspect at this point it’s mostly inertia acting functionally like a cabal. There was a time when the best way to get a quote would have been to talk to an agent who would then do COMPLICATED MATH you could not comprehend and return a number to you. This is no longer the case, but apparently no one thought it would be profitable or worthwhile to go all-transparent or make insurers’ methods and rates public. So we keep doing it the old way.
That’s why I suspect the consumer side is the place to fix this. We have the means to acquire and publish the data, but it requires a certain level of time investment and coordination.
Every single company profits from making it hard to compare their prices against the competition.
Additionally big corporations are good at coordinating. Big Banks seem to be engaged in such illegal coopertion on a daily basis.
True; it’s insane that no one’s done the relatively small amount of work it should take to fix this.