The Association of British Insurers (ABI) has welcomed the launch of the Dilnot report on long-term care, supporting its proposed partnership between the state and the individual.

The ABI’s chairman, Tim Breedon, says the report offers hope of a “clear, stable framework” in which the insurance market can develop a range of products that can allow individuals to pay for their share of the costs, while keeping the family home.

Key recommendations in the report are:

Individuals’ lifetime contributions towards their social care costs – which are currently potentially unlimited – should be capped at £35,000.

Afte

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Half of employers questioned in a recent survey consider long-term sick leave to be an issue for their business, with 27% admitting it gives them a major staffing headache.

However, new research from Aviva UK Health also indicates that employers feel the strain emotionally when managing more complex illnesses in the workplace.

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You know that life insurance is important when you want to protect your family. Term life insurance is desirable because it offers a relatively high amount of coverage for a fairly low price. However, just knowing that you can find online insurance quotes for low priced term life insurance doesn’t help you figure out how much you need. Before getting your term life quotes, be sure to know how much life insurance you will need to adequately protect your family’s financial well being.

Factors that Influence How Much Life Insurance You Need

When determining how much term life insurance coverage you need, it is important to consider a number of factors. The

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Poor Sid Vicious! Hes a mixed breed dog that needed an emergency visit to the vet for gastroenteritis. Here are the costs involved with a 3 day, 2 night stay in the intensive care unit.

You can see the veterinarians had to rule out a variety of conditions using various diagnostic tests, some of which had to be repeated:

• Parvo (blood work)
• Giardia (blood work)
• ingestion of a foreign body (X-rays aka radiographs)
• organ and intestinal abnormalities (ultrasound)

Sid Vicious premiums are $273.79 a year for $300 annual deductible, $10,000 annual maximum, and 20% coinsurance.

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A recent report from the Insurance Information Institute (I.I.I.) put a spotlight on the problem of unclaimed life insurance benefits and offered tips on how this type of situation can be avoided.

To ensure that life insurance benefits do not go unclaimed, the I.I.I. report put forth the following advice to life insurance policyholders.

Inform the insurance company in the event of a change of personal information

If the policyholder moves, changes his phone number or even his email address, he should inform the insurance company of these changes so that communication is not a problem in the future.

Provide beneficiaries with detailed information about the policy

A policyholder should make sure that all beneficiaries listed on her life insurance policy know how to get in touch with the insurance company and also know basic details about the policy (e.g.

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The Association of British Insurers (ABI) is calling for a clampdown on the “pain in the neck” culture which it says has made the UK the whiplash capital of Europe.

With one in every 140 people claiming whiplash injuries a year, the ABI highlights the need for action as follows:

Nearly 1,200 whiplash claims are made every day in the UK; six times more than the number of people who claim for workplace-related injury every year.

The cost to the NHS of treating whiplash is estimated at £8 million a year.

Three-quarters of personal injury claims in the UK are for whiplash, more than elsewhere in Europe.

Insurers pay out nearly £2 billion a year in claims for whiplash.

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One of the biggest buzz topics in insurance marketing right now is social networking, the practice of users sharing links, talking to one another and catching up via web-based tools available through personal computers, mobile phones and now tablet PCs like the iPad.

People can’t stop talking about it and its effect on how business is done. Some are saying it’s the new fact of insurance marketing and is here to stay; others dismiss it as a fad.

As much as it may seem to be the realm of teenagers, and despite how quickly social networking has exploded, the honest truth is that it is most certainly not going away. Read all post…

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has given three banks a temporary extension to the current deadline for dealing with Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) complaints.

Normally, complaints have to receive a response within eight weeks but in the case of Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS, the regulator has recognised the scale of the backlogs created by the High Court case brought by the British Bankers’ Association over revised FSA rules for PPI complaints handling.

The Authority’s interim managing director Conduct Business Unit, Margaret Cole, explains: “Some firms are facing a huge backlog and now a surge of new complaints which has created a bottleneck.”

She adds: “It is not in the interests of consumers to receive further poor handling of their complaints as a result.”

Temporary changes are as follows:

PPI complaints still with the firm but put on hold during the judicial review will receive a decision by the end of August;

PPI complaints received after the conclusion of judicial review but on or before the 31st August will be responded to within 16 weeks; and

PPI complaints received on or after 1st September and before 31st December 2011 will be responded to within 12 weeks.

In return, firms with the temporary time extensions will have to:

Keep PPI complainants and their customers fully informed; and

Provide the FSA with regular reports on compliance.

The arrangements only apply to the three named banks and the FSA expects all PPI complaints handling to return to the eight-week standard by 1st January 2012, at the latest.

Also today, Barclays announced that it will settle all outstanding PPI complaints received before 20th April on a “no quibble” basis, as a gesture of goodwill.