Insurance and moral risk
While it’s great to have access to insurance facilities and indeed essential to many parts of our lives, there are guidelines we need to adhere to in order to protect our access to it.
While insurers want to insure you, there’s no obligation for them to do so, especially if there is evidence of moral risk, they can refuse cover or avoid claims where non-disclosure is uncovered.
The key is ‘disclosure’ at application time, be honest and up front, tell it like it is and they can assess the risk and price accordingly, the consequences of non-disclosure, misrepresentation and fraudulent claims can be far reaching and have devastating effects.
Claims history, drink driving, drug convictions and criminal records are all factors of moral risk that need to be disclosed, making false claims can lead to having all your insurances cancelled which in turn can lead to having a mortgage withdrawn and having to sell your home or business and affect future insurability for years to come.
Ensuring your insurance cover is watertight is vitally important, whether it’s for life, income, health, general or business insurance the same principles apply and the last thing you need is to not be covered when you really need it, one way to do that is to disclose all material facts from the outset.
Insurance is built on trust, misrepresentation and non-disclosure of material circumstances is a sure fire way to destroy that trust, their actuarial, underwriting and legal departments are all over it and with the right information the risk can be assessed and priced accordingly so you can have peace of mind that you’ve done the right thing and will be covered when you need it most.
In wrapping up our segment on insurance, its an important message to convey, as the consequences of not getting it right can be devastating.