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I have. Here’s my story.
I come from a technocratic profession that requires us to do a medical examination every year. Our license depends on the medical cert. Losing the medical cert means losing the license altogether. And without the license, there is no career in this profession. That is how important the medical cert is to us.
As you might imagine, losing this medical cert is a nightmare. And here enters an insurance agent — let’s call her A. A became privy to the importance of the medical cert and spied a business opportunity.
She approached us one by one, and one day, our paths crossed. I was very young at that time, in my early 20s, although being young is no excuse for being stupid — that was all on me.
Anyway, A pitched an insurance policy to me. According to her, the policy she had to offer would insure my medical cert, so that if one day, the unfortunate happened and I lost my license, I would have the cash to continue on.
What a great deal, right? I certainly thought so then, except…
Such a policy didn’t exist. What she sold me was a regular life policy. In other words, I would have had to be dead to get a single sen.
I only found out because a more savvy friend shook my policy before my eyes, demanding, “Show me your license number in here, show me!” Needless to say, there was no license number in there, because the policy was insuring my life, not my medical cert.
After I found out, I fought the insurance company and eventually got all my money back. But it was time spent I will never get back. I learned a valuable lesson that day: don’t take an insurance agent’s words for granted.
The other day, I noticed a Facebook post making its rounds. An unscrupulous agent had sold his client life policies but presented them as savings/investment plans (sounds familiar?). The victim fought a 2-year battle and eventually got his money back. Good for him.
Nowadays, when I’m shopping for an insurance policy, I do my own homework and trust nobody. I ask for material from different companies and scour them line by line. Then I make a table of my options and ask around about the company’s in-house doctors (they are crucial to your claims coming through and boy, do I have some nightmare stories about them).
Dear reader, if there is only one takeaway point I wish to impart to you, it is this: don’t trust an insurance agent.
#notallinsuranceagents
Chow Ping Lee is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav.
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