If insurance companies had to provide performance measures such as percentage of claims honoured , days elapsed before payments made, percentage of fire, flood, water damage claims honoured it would be very easy for consumers to pick which companies were good . Similarly other companies should have to report on number of complaints made and resolved, time taken to answer calls to service lines and so on. At the moment companies hide behind dodgy call centres and make it impossible to talk to anyone with the authority to actually resolve an issue. Centrelink are the poster boy for just how bad this can be. They knowingly engaged in an illegal activity to take money off people and their only appeals process only served to reinforce their illegal process. I am also curious as to why such illegal action has not resulted in any punitive action or people losing their job.
We desperately need open measures of performance that demonstrates how well all organisations taking money deal with the community. This should apply to for profit organisations, charities (how much and how quickly does money get to someone in need) and government departments. Imagine if we had published performance figures on aged care or disability providers.
So many bad providers have gotten away with poor performance for so long it’s become their right to deny and decline. For example food now has to have a star rating. But insurance for a million dollar home could be worthless. This implies we are more worried about a bag of chips than people’s most important asset or how we look after people who have contributed to the economy for 45+ years.
So let’s start something that says how well organisations perform in serving the community and the consumer
