Huh, I thought shopping for computer-telephony interfaces or scalable web-hosting infrastructure was hard. A little research lately has convinced me that shopping for any sort of insurance must be at least as difficult and probably more.
There is one inherent fact about insurance that seeds the complexity: you’re trying to predict complicated and rare events. The more predictable an event is, actually, the less likely it’s going to be insurable, or insurable at a rate you’re willing to pay. I mean, if you can predict an event with some certainty, you should be using a bank account instead of an insurance policy.
There’s also the psychological twist that these are events that you just plain don’t want to happen. That probably tends to make you undervalue the little information you do have that helps you make your predictions, and causes you to want to just hurry up and get done making the decisions.
On top of all that is, I’m pretty sure, a general tendency for insurance companies to purposely make it harder to buy their products. A great tension exists between the generally communal idea of insurance (we all pool our money together to help whoever needs it) and the capitalist imperative to profit. Basically, insurance companies can only profit to the degree that they hide their actuarial knowledge from their customers.
I was looking at health insurance tonight and was presented with a painful interface to choose a policy. I specified a few parameters in very general terms, and they presented me with dozens of possible policies to choose from, with a ‘comparison’ feature that did little to enlighten me about the differences. It kind of reminds me of that game Black Box where you’re trying to discern what’s in the box by shooting a tiny number of rays into the darkness, though this particular game of black box is probably 80-dimensional instead of 2D. My choices would still not be easy even if I had a full view of the model(s) they use to design these policies, but…