Car Insurance Premiums
In Malaysia, premiums for car insurance (or auto insurance as it is known in some other countries) are fixed by Bank Negara Malaysia. Therefore, assuming your car is 1,500cc, the base premium chargeable will be the same whether you purchase your insurance from Insurer A or Insurer B. This pretty much reduces the headache of shopping around for cheap car insurance amongst the many insurers available. Probably the only thing that distinguishes one insurer to another is the reputation of their claims service (which, in my opinion, is the most important factor), the network of service or repair centres available in the event of a breakdown or accident and to a small extent, the freebies that come with the purchase of the insurance.
In some other countries, however, the premiums chargeable for car insurance differs from insurer to insurer. Car owners will have to do a fair bit of shopping around for the best car insurance rates available and this can be a mind boggling exercise. One shortcut to finding the best rates for car insurance is to approach your trusted insurance agent who would be able to give you a recommendation or two depending on your needs. Otherwise, you can also check for the best car insurance deals through online insurance companies or brokers. By entering some salient information and with a couple of clicks on the mouse, you will have a fair idea of what kind of insurance rates you are expected to pay for your car.
As mentioned above, the premium rates in Malaysia are fixed and is mainly based on the cubic capacity of the car. In other countries however, the age of the car and the type of the car can have a bearing on the premium chargeable. To promote safety and thus, lessening the risk of the insured perils, having safety features such as anti-lock braking systems, theft locks and air bags will reduce the insurance premium payable. In some countries, even nitty gritties like the age and sex of the owner or driver also affects the car insurance premium payable! I suppose they must have some good statistics to prove that certain drivers of certain age and sex are more prone to car accidents than others!
Whilst the flexible rates policy as practiced in other countries sound attractive as it caters to the exact needs and niche of the owner, I would still prefer the system currently available in Malaysia which takes a whole load of headache away when a car owner decides to choose the right auto insurance.
Life Insurance Policies and Suicide
Before I started to handle insurance cases, I always thought that suicide is a not an insured peril. My understanding at that point of time was that suicide is usually a deliberate conduct rather than an accident and therefore, it goes against the very nature of insurance policies to insured accidental events. I was right to a certain extent because this has been the legal position for many years. The first possible defence to a claim by an Estate for suicide is the fact that the death was intentional and brought upon by the insured himself and the second defence was that it would be against public policy to allow the Estate to benefit from the insured’s own conduct, which is deemed a criminal conduct in some jurisdictions.
Even so, some have successfully argued that where the suicide was committed in a state of insanity, the first defence would be knocked out and surely, it would not be against public policy to pay out on the claim. Realising this, insurance companies began to add a further exclusion clause into their life insurance policies to exclude coverage for insane suicide, i.e, where the insured committed suicide whilst in a state of insanity.
Nonetheless, realising that in certain other cases, the insured and / or his estate does not directly benefit from the suicide event (this is so in life insurance policies where the beneficiaries are third parties), insurers have begun to re-evaluate the exclusion towards claims resulting from suicide. Modern day clauses sometimes do include coverage for suicide with an express proviso that the benefit will only take effect after the lapse of a stipulated period of time, usually after 12 months from the date of the issuance of the policy. This, in a way, reduces the likelihood of an insured purchasing low cost life insurance solely with the view to committing suicide to benefit their loved ones.
So far, I have not actually handled any insurance claim resulting from suicide but I have seen some insurance policies with coverage for suicide, albeit on restricted terms. To my knowledge, there is no reported local decisions in Malaysia or even Singapore on an insurance claim arising out of suicide. It would definitely be interesting to see the outcome of one.