Policies normally provide assistance in the form of a fixed lump or annual sum. LTCI represents a relatively new market, with only around 20,000 policies sold to date, but this may increase sharply if proposals contained in the Government's recent consultation paper, A New Partnership for Care in Old Age, come into effect. The OFT report focuses on those policies which require the individual consumer to decide the nature and size of the cover provided. Group cover policies are not examined in depth. The study found that, while each market had its own distinctive features, a number of issues were common to the majority of medical insurance products.
Policies are complex .
Notwithstanding the regulations covering contract terms, individual consumers are unlikely to find health insurance policies easy to grasp. This is partly because both the medical and insurance aspects of these policies are highly specialised and inherently complicated. Policy cover varies . The report gives a detailed analysis of products, suppliers and promotional methods, following which the Director General makes a number of recommendations for each insurance market. Among his more general conclusions was that insurers could and should do more to facilitate easier comparisons between policies in a given market, by drawing up 'benchmark' products based on a common set of terms and conditions.