I think that choice is a good thing, personally. If there was no choice we would certainly be hammered.
I thought I would never change from electric Ireland but I did to get a better deal. I am with Aviva for years for home and car insurance because I find them very good. I do have a look around when my renewal arrives but always stay with them. I used to be with Sky for TV and Eir for phone , broadband but now I have all with Eir. We are with Laya for a good many years, my wife looks around every year but always stays with them because their plans suits us.
So it is a personal choice really because what suits me might not suit you ..
There are strong arguments for privatisation and competition in most aspects of life, but I agree that health is not one of them. There is huge (and growing) information asymmetry between patients as consumers and hospitals/clinicians as service providers.
When you are purchasing health insurance you have to consider the cost of lifetime community rating, your past medical history, family history, your age, family planning, your job, lifestyle, hobbies, travel, and so on. Then you have to look geographically to see which hospitals are covered near you, if there are VHI/Laya urgent care centres close by, etc. You have to understand what a high-tech hospital is, what level of orthopaedic/eye surgery is covered, if you get a private room, whether outpatient fees are refunded, adding children...
Then there are excess/co-pay options which can be per night or per stay. Mental health benefits vary. They all seem to be very generous in their coverage of complete nonsense "alternative therapies" but will exclude other legitimate and necessary treatments. Some of them will cover a particular chemotherapy but others won't. And this all changes like the wind, so even the hospitals and clinicians can't keep up with it.
VHI lists 81 plans, Laya has 121, and Irish Life has 178! The HIA comparison tool is helpful but it's still daunting. I think they are depending on a lot of us getting analysis paralysis and just sticking with our current plan.
I find it very frustrating that we have pensioners on low, fixed incomes who are so (understandably) worried about the level of access and care in the HSE that they pay for private insurance, often on top of a medical card. I have elderly relatives who pay 10-15% of their small pension on a middle-of-the-road VHI plan out of fear they will otherwise be stuck on a trolley or left on a waiting list for basic treatment.
The thing is if we just had VHI it wouldn't be the VHI we have now. The regulators here immediately suffer industry capture and I have zero confidence that we would have a regulator who actively pushes VHI to act as if it has competitors and to keep prices low \ improve its offering and services.
If we had one supplier of health insurance, car insurance it would be riddled with feather bedding and inefficiencies and the consumer would be zero in its priorities.,
I tend to agree. Something like three to four plans per supplier each within basic parameters. The current number of plans (300 across all providers) is just there to confuse people.The problem imo is private health insurance but if you have to work with it could the regulator limit the plans to say 10 per company and have some sort of band they offer them in, public only, private, hi tech. So maybe you have 3 plans in each and 3 companies. More manageable.
What makes you think without competition you wouldn't just end up with the bad prices... why would you end up with 'good' ones in normal times?What about electricity. Do we really benefit from the competition? Maybe I do as I jump around but my parents don't so they lose out.
We now have government intervention in the market because heating/ cooking is essential but it's still fighting with who had a good/ bad price.
I ended up with an extremely high price last year as my contract ran out at the peak. Although I had it good leading up to that.
I'm not against private generation, different companies with different tech all trying to sell to a grid. It just might be better for society if we had one seller imo.
Let's go back to when Aer Lingus was the only option and no one could afford their fares!Are we really benefiting from all this competition?
What makes you think without competition you wouldn't just end up with the bad prices... why would you end up with 'good' ones in normal times?
You wouldn't have anywhere to jump around to, and the company would have zero incentive to be offering you good prices.
There are some suppliers who offer fixed base rates such as Flogas, but not all and typically not the previous semi-state monopolies such as EI or Bord Gais iirc.The problem I see with the jumping around is that I can't sign up for a set price for x months. My discount is guaranteed but not my base rate. I can sign up and then the supplier can up the prices the next day. That's not how most contracts work.
What you're referring to there is hedging where a supplier sets a rate and takes on the risk of prices changing. Of course most weigh the balance of that risk in their favour and the consumer pays more.My discount is guaranteed but not my base rate. I can sign up and then the supplier can up the prices the next day. That's not how most contracts work.
I was an Ulster Bank customer, if I had the choice I'd go back to them in the morning as their App and Online banking was streets ahead of anything their Irish competitors can offer.
If I'm going to spend 3-5k on health insurance for the family every year, I expect to have to put a little bit of work into it in terms of understanding what I need and don't need. And it's not difficult to be honest to cover off the main point when checking things.
And I will never forget living in London and booking Christmas flights home every January for the following Christmas and paying the equivalent of a modern trans-atlantic flight for it. And then Ryanair came along and changed the game
It reduced health insurance costs as well. In terms of confusion on the number of plans available, just look at the ones the providers are actively advertising, and use the HIA site to find and compare suitable plans. The reason there are so many plans available is so that the providers can charge people who just renew on their existing plan more. Each year or so they launch new plans that offer the same cover for less than the old plan.I am certainly not for no competition. Competition works very well in the airline industry.
It’s a pity that more suppliers don’t offer a product without the fixed prices.What you're referring to there is hedging where a supplier sets a rate and takes on the risk of prices changing.
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