2023-05-17 06:22:52
in the offer of death insurance de Santalucía there is a product specially designed for the elderly. It is called ‘Senior Assistance Prima Unica’. “We have two types of Funeral Insurance for the different customer profiles: periodic premium and single premium.” The latter is the one indicated “for a senior profile”, company sources explain to this medium.
As detailed on its website, it is a “personal death and assistance insurance aimed at people over 70 years of age that, for various reasons, are not yet covered by this type of product, with the comfort of paying in the form of a single premium”.
Actually, from the age of 70, it is the only product in this branch of insurance that the company allows to hire. In essence, it consists of hiring burial coverage and paying it in full in a single receipt. It is a modality that has grown a lot in recent years and is already offered by all companies.
“Through a single payment, the client will be able to contract his Death Insurance without having to pay successive bills and thus be able to have all the advantages and guarantees available,” Santalucía tells us. 65YMÁS has analyzed the fine print of death insurance for the elderly in Santalucía and we have found that, in addition to being expensive, it can bring us some nasty surprise: guarantees with expiration dates and payments added over time.
An insurance that can exceed 11,000 euros
Obtaining the price of a single premium death insurance is not an easy task. Prices move between very wide ranges. “The variables that determine the price, fundamentally, are the age and the service capital associated with the funeral service of each locality. To a lesser extent, there are other factors such as transportation and complementary coverage”, explains Santalucía. “If we talk about a single premium” she adds, “we are between average scales between 3.500 € y 4.500 €”.
However, 65YMÁS has requested rates through the company’s own website and the result has been quite different. Whether we skimp as much as possible, opting for cremation and dispensing with a columbarium and no other cemetery option, the result is not less than 5,000 euros. Moreover, if we add the complementary coverage offered by the company the price shoots up to exceed 11,000 euros.
To carry out the calculation we have chosen a 77-year-old person residing in Madrid. To see if it is possible to lower the bill, we choose sacrifice the maximum temporality for a five-year niche. That is to say, after five years, it would be necessary to pay again for the niche, or to vacate it.
Frightened by the figures, we change our choice again. In this case we select cremation and skip the graveyard. After cremation service We’ll take the ashes home.
Choose very well the type of service desired
Cremation, with or without columbarium, niche with maximum or minimum duration, burial in a burial unit that we already own, with or without tombstone, with or without inscription, burial with maximum or minimum duration, cremation only, and we take the ashes home… the options are multiple and change depending on where we live. But we must choose carefully at the time of hiring, so as not to be surprised later.
In fact, this is one of the main reasons for customer complaints. Relatives discover after the death of their relative, that their death insurance does not include items they had.
Insurance…..
My father passed away 11 years ago paying insurance since he was 32 years old, he died at 88.
At that time we found out that only the coffin and the funeral fit, we had to pay for cremation, funeral home, niche and tombstone.
When my brother passed away…— Emi Roas, Mimi ???????? (@EmiRoas) April 18, 2023
So, to avoid these situations, we add services again, in this case a columbarium with tombstone and inscription. The price logically goes up again.
Added coverages: they trigger the price and have an expiration date
“Funeral services are not cheap, especially if they were contracted with death insurance,” says OCU. “There are additional coverages and guarantees that can be interesting, but they are really expensive,” he explains. Enrique García, OCU spokesman (@consumidores).
Indeed, as we have seen, the complementary guarantees are the ones that trigger the price of Santalucía insurance, however interesting they may be, such as the special package for the elderly, which includes telecare services or geriatric evaluation; travel assistance, accident coverage or medical assistance.
Additionally, the fine print of the Santalucía insurance contract establishes that the additional guarantees have a validity date of ten years from the moment of contracting. If, as in our case, we have opted for the most complete version of the insurance, when our insured turns 87, she will lose the medical assistance, accident, travel and senior assistance guarantees, when she probably needs them the most, unless pay for them again.
Additional increases to the single payment
Reviewing the fine print of the insurance conditions ‘Single premium senior assistance’ we find that the after the single payment in a receipt at the time of hiring, subsequent payments may follow “Assuming that the increase in actual service costs exceed 10% the costs estimated by the Insurer”, says the general conditions of the contract.
Insurance mediation sources explain 65YMÁS that Santalucia “does not raise prices based on inflation, which would be an objective indicator and that we can all know. The rate update that they handle is based on funeral budgets, which they usually do themselves”. The mediation representative refers to Albia, the funeral home that belongs to Santalucía herself. “There is no transparency and Santalucía clings to the prices of the supplying funeral home, which is theirs.”
“This accusation is generally made against all the big insurers, which in turn have funeral homes, but Santalucía is much more aggressive. In fact, note that Santalucía does not work with brokers, or much less than the others, it works above all with its own offices and exclusive agents. They are very expensive and very aggressive ”, he explains to us.
Aurelio Sánchez, president of Esfune (@Asc_Esfune), employer of small funeral homesconfirms that funeral homes that belong to insurers, such as Albia, make the services more expensive. “That’s reportable,” she says. “We have achieved that in Catalonia, if you enter a funeral home, you see the prices, but in the rest of Spain it does not happen. Funeral homes should have their prices public. If not, this is a smack game.“, Add.
“In theory, each item is quantified and if the global service falls below the sum of the insured capital, the difference must be returned, but this never happens”, explains Aurelio Sánchez.
Leading company with ‘less leading’ insurance
Santalucía is the leading company in the death insurance market in Spain with a market share of over 30%. However, their insurance does not appear in the top positions in the ranking of the best consumer death products. “The last ranking that we have published, from November 2021, indicates that of Clinicum, followed by Meridian”, explains Enrique García, spokesman for the FATHER. “We have also done an analysis of single premium insurance. Here the first company is Ocaso and Nortehispana and the last one is Preventive and Generali, from nearly 15 companies. Santalucía is in seventh place in the ranking”.
“Santalucía’s death insurance is one of the most complete in the Spanish insurance market” they say from the comparator Selectra. However, “In what corresponds to the opinions of the users, the general evaluation is not entirely positive. Quite a few complain about delays when collecting compensation and criticize the increases in the price of the policy”, they add.
Scarce offer from the age of 65
Contracting death insurance with periodic payment is difficult after the age of 65, because the market is very restricted. But from the age of 70, taking out death insurance whose premium we can pay every month is simply an impossible mission. Insurance companies no longer allow it. A senior aged 70 or over only has the option of single premium insurance, that is, paying it in full.
This type is minority with respect to the rest of the types of death insurance with periodic payment. According to the data of the reportDeath Insurance. Statistics year 2021′ of Iceaso alone 2.3% of death insurance in 2021 were single premium.
However, they are the ones that have registered the greatest growth. The single premium is experiencing a significant boom, “whose amount in premiums exceeds 60% of new contracts” according to the report ‘The Spanish insurance market in 2021’ from Mapfre Foundation. “The single premium, as one more option in the insurance offer, has had a significant percentage growth in recent years,” acknowledges 65YMÁS sources of Unespa.
People who had never thought about this type of insurance, from a certain age begin to think about how to avoid complications for their children. The pandemic has greatly promoted this type of insurance. “We remember Santa Bárbara when it thunders, and when we see prospects of needing it is when we hire it” says the Vice President of the Association of Insurance Brokers of Madrid, Ángel del Amo.
“Focusing on the registrations of new insured people aged 65 or over, based on internal data, of every 10 insured, 8 would receive a periodic premium and 2 a single premium”, they explain to us from Santalucía. They are hiring people up to 70 because, from then on, the periodic bonus is no longer possible.
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