Roundabout
Bet You Anything
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN Mind you, I know plenty of people who wouldn't be where they are but for insurance, and I do not just mean important men from the Pru in hospital suffering from cracked skulls. There is the young couple who have decorated their house on the proceeds of a fire started by a tramp in the attic, a tramp now being sought eagerly by all their friends; and one of the nicest skirts my mother ever had, replaced one on which she had leaned too long and too medita- tively at the ironing-board. There are even subtler ways of playing the insurance game: I know of a man (I had better not be too precise about this) whose fowls mysteriously develop pest in exact relation to his overdraft, since the Government insures you against this by compen- sating you for their compulsory destruction: it is quite as good a racket as the old-fashioned fire in a flagging fur firm.
But few have the chance actually to profit from insurance. All that most people want is a pro- tection from disaster—and a chance to know to which disasters the protection applies. (`Come back !' shouted Elizabeth Beresford once to a man who was photographing a snake, 'You're not insured for that !') And it is presumably up to us whether we succeed in guessing correctly what disasters we may encounter. Skaters insure their legs and singers their voices; 1 suppose there is no reason why politicians should not insure their smiles, and dons could even insure their brains, except that it would be so hard to sub- stantiate a claim. Personally, I would like most to insure against loss of insurance certificates and loss of temper. But in such cases, it is plainly tip to us how, what and whether we insure.
Not so with car insurance: it is exacted by law; so that the whims of insurance companies can often take on the force of law. It is well known that certain companies refuse altogether to insure certain categories of people, like students and actors; and no doubt, statistically, they have a perfectly sound case. It seems to be less widely known how readily a company will refuse insurance to a car on which it has already had to pay up twice, regardless of why it had to pay—I heard of a girl, for example, whose first smash was just one of those things, but whose second was caused by leaving her car under a tree which subsequently fell down. Plenty of people do not put in claims when they could because they are so afraid of the company refusing to insure them next time, and once one company has refused you it may be almost impossible to get another one to take you on.
Now I know that there are people who, though it is never their own fault, are accident-prone in a statistically recognisable sense. It is always their
aeroplanes which are fog-bound, their heads that are underneath the falling brick, their darkened halls in which people leave unsuspected prams: look at all those people who are always the one to find the bluebottle in the lettuce. And so the insurance companies say, understandably, that they are less interested in whose fault these things are than in staying clear of such people altogether. And if commerce was all that was involved, it would be fair enough. But where you get hnsurance insisted upon by law, as in the case of third-party risk, then it is not fair enough: because law must not be right in general but unjust in particular cases. Statisti- cally, it might pay to imprison every teenager with an ugly smile, or slap a poll tax on every successful businessman, on the grounds that the ene will probably end up thieving and the other is almost certainly fiddling his income tax. But however statistically satisfying it might be it would still be judicially revolting because in law you have to prove that it is the individual, and not the type, that is at fault.
By their power to refuse insurance the companies at the moment also have the power h., keep people off the roads, even if these people have committed no offence in law. It seems to me that the Government is putting a good deal of business in the companies' way by demanding compulsory third-party insurance, and that it would be perfectly reasonable for it to require in return that they standardise premiums and accept everyone legally permitted to drive. People who get licences to run ferries, after all, have to take the roughs with the smoothies even if the former are likely to be sick over the floor; and they have to keep up the services at uneconomic times of day as well as rush hours. So long as insurance is required by law, it ought to be required by law to behave fairly, And while they are about it, they could clean up this business about the supposed value of the object insured in other fields. Insure your stamp album for five hundred pounds; lose it; discover that its market value is in fact four hundred, and four hundred is what you get. Find that it is worth six hundred and you still will not get a penny over five. I know this is determined by the ruling that you can only insure a genuine loss to yourself—I cannot, for example, insure the life of General de Gaulle and sit back hoping the next assassination will succeed. But it would surely be possible to establish that the loss must genuinely affect the person, without making that the measure of the extent of the loss? It is logical to insure a given sum for a given premium: a straight bet for a straight sum. It is equally logical to insure for replacement value, whatever that may happen to be. But to make it replacement value or the sum insured, whichever happens to be the smaller, is heads you lose tails we don't pay up.
I cannot help feeling too, that we could do with a firmer mechanism for making insurance companies pay up promptly. Insurance com- panies tell you that promptness in settling up is one of the things which distinguish the big/, expensive/ reputable companies from the little tin-pot places; but I have never heard of any company, however tin-pot, that accepted an interminable delay in our side of the bargain— the premiums. I would have thought it possible to make insurance companies liable to pay within a fixed, short time unless they lodged with the courts a doubt as to the fairness of the claim; and, side by side with that, a penalty imposed on any company which lodged such a claim if the court then decided it had no good reason for lodging it.
Obviously, these various reforms might result in slightly higher premiums all round; but I think it would be worth it for the sake of fairness. Insurance exists, after all, to level out the un- fairness of life; to be a way of combating the fact that one bloke's brake-block breaks and the next bloke's does not. It is the net under the tightrope; and if the net itself has holes in it, the whole thing becomes pointless; since there is no known way of insuring against the unfairness of an insurance company.
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