Quality Product Research - Medical: review process commenced for non-surgical hospitalisation

Recently, while traveling, Jon-Paul Hale called our team to discuss the removal of the non-surgical hospitalisation feature in  various health products by Southern Cross, one being Wellbeing, which we currently rate on Quotemonster.

I am deeply grateful to JP for his tireless efforts in identifying issues like this. If you want to explore in more detail what that change is I recommend you look at JP’s article at this link: Southern Cross drops $60k benefit by stealth: agents - Good Returns After that you may also want to take in the response by Southern Cross published at this link: Southern Cross says it told advisers, policyholders of withdrawn benefit - Good Returns

We know that when an insurer makes changes like this one, they may not want to shout it from the rooftops. Our process of research review is all about building regular communication and high levels of engagement to try and make the process of rating a product predictable, trusted, and clear. That means engaging with advisers, insurers, reinsurers, and other industry experts frequently. In fact, we have recently been in touch with all our medical insurers regarding feature weighting and values as part of the medical claims review. We would rather that we picked this up ourselves in 2020, but in the midst of a pandemic and regular lockdowns, this update was missed, however a major review of the benefit has now commenced. Since then, we have welcomed two people into our research team, to bring it to a total of four, and have invested considerably in improving how we approach insurer product changes. We now do a full document comparison, identify, and review any changes, including upgrades or downgrades. Ensuring that these processes will identify material changes in policy terms was one of the main items when we gathered the research team together on Thursday last week. In our review, we will consider comments made by Southern Cross in the media that claims payable in this feature are now covered in other benefits, we also note the dollar limits attached to some of those features. Furthermore, as part of that research meeting, we reviewed recent Statistics New Zealand data which show many tens of thousands of non-surgical private hospital visits, many of which lasted many days.

Our guide to research details the process of investigation, review, and external consultation in full. We will also discuss our review and findings in our next research advisory board meeting, which is coming up in Christchurch.

We highly value getting your feedback on any non-surgical hospitalisation claims you have experienced with any medical insurers, as advisers get to see firsthand how these wordings are being applied to claims.  Any information you can provide will be valuable input to determine the scope of the change required. We look forward to hearing from you.