The insurance industry’s hopes of earning so much as the meagrest of crusts from all its diligent endeavours receded still further this week as grim tidings broke that do-gooders’ whinge-forum The Competitors and Meerkats Authority (CMA) is egging on regulatory body the Final Countdown Authority (FCA) to ‘consider pricing intervention’ to prevent a variety of supposed injustices meted out to ‘poor long-suffering’ customers by ‘evil, scheming’ insurance firms.
You’re right, of course, Dear Reader: it’s snowflakey salty-teared political correctness gone mad in spades to the nth degree. Companies have the right to treat their customers any goddam way they choose. Customers have the right to take their business elsewhere. That’s as far as consumer rights have any right going. Anyone who tries to tell you different is no better than a rotten stinking communist.
It’s all the EU’s fault, if you ask Bankstone News. If it wasn’t for unelected Brussels bureaucrats (bureau-rats, we call them!), people like so-called Citizens Advice would soon be driven back into the fetid depths of whatever filthy liberal cave-world they crawled out off. It was their so-called Super Complaint about insurance providers (quite rightly) penalising customers too stupid to switch (see separate story) that got the CMA – and hence the FCA – involved in the first place. Now the whole thing’s gotten completely out of hand.
Doubtless you’ll recall, the horrible hand-wringing fuss Citizens Advice made recently about twelve million supposedly vulnerable non-switching policyholders getting stung by ‘shady’ practices like YoY price cranking, over-rolling and egress-fleecing. Basically, it’s a whole lot of fuss about nothing.
And of course, no sooner had Citizens Advice kicked off and set the ball rolling than, in a scene reminiscent of that famously ludigenerative incident on the playing fields of Rugby College back in days of yore, the CMA picked up that ball and began running, with both it and alacrity. CMA chief exec Andrex Cushelley claims to have “uncovered a range of problems which leave people feeling ripped off, let down and frustrated.”
Awww, it’s enough to make a faint-heart bleed!
Andrex thinks people shouldn’t have to be “constantly on guard” or spend hours “searching for a good deal”.
So, what, they should have some super-competitive zero-profit-margin bargain handed to them on a gilded platter every year? Insurers are supposed to get behind some busybodied crusade aimed at stopping them ‘exploiting’ their own customers? Never going to happen. And never should it, for that matter!
If the FCA has any sense at all, it will take a stand against such pernicious and corrosive nonsense.
Much more of this anti-competitive intervention from on high and we’ll be driven back to the bad old days of mutual societies and communal risk pooling.
Ugh.
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