Insurance Claims Statistics

The biggest concern with any type of insurance is the question of when I need it, will it be there for me? After all, the sole reason we insurer ourselves is to have the peace of mind that money will be there when we need it.

Well fret not, recent statistics show that insurers are paying out claims at an unprecedented rate.

The vast amount of 4.4 billion dollars of insurance claims was paid to Australians in 2012 across the 11 retail insurance providers. Income Protection payouts across the retail industry totalled to over 1.1 billion while TPD and Trauma made up 717 million, and 555 million respectively. The largest payout across the industry by a large margin was life, which totalled to a whopping 1.96 billion dollars of payments. What’s even more fascinating is that these statistics don’t take into account the claims paid from superannuation fund’s group insurance policies, so in reality the figures should be even higher!

So what is the cause of all these claim payments? The three largest causes of claim for life insurance are cancer, heart disease and respiratory failure. While for Total and Permanent Disablement insurance musculoskeletal conditions lead the way with mental disorders and cancer coming in second and third. Trauma’s most common causes of claims were cancer, heart disease and neurological disorders like strokes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

It really hammers home the necessity of insurance when an average of $17.6 million was paid to Australians every working day in 2012. Not one of the claimants expected or wanted to claim on their insurances but wouldn’t have liked to be without it when life didn’t go according to plan.