The hidden costs of mutual insurance: how brokers increase your contributions

This text corresponds to part of the transcription of the report above. Click on the video to watch it in full. Georges, 78 years old, pays his complementary health insurance 195 euros each month.

In 10 years, its contribution has doubled for the same level of guarantee. And like many of us, when he has a health need, he has difficulty understanding what his mutual insurance will reimburse him. He admits not knowing how to read his table of guarantees: “Pages like that, we never read them,” he assures.

Illegible contracts, skyrocketing prices, this pushes the French to want to change mutual insurance companies. And to see things more clearly, we are increasingly using online comparison sites. Their names?

Assurland, LesFurets, Meilleurtaux and HyperAssur. What you may not know is that when you register your telephone number on these sites, it is sold to brokers, intermediaries who work on behalf of complementary health insurance companies. They are supposed to advise you to choose the contract that best suits your needs.

But for this service, without knowing it, you pay very dearly in your contribution each month. “We have a duty to advise, but sometimes, profitability was more important” Jérémy worked for a brokerage firm specializing in health. He agreed to testify about current practices in this sector, anonymously.

“We received customer files that arrived from comparators. The goal was to call as many customers as possible. It was to call all the time.

There are figures to be made, we had a lot of pressure," he explains. According to Jérémy, 80% of his clients were seniors, those who pay the most for their complementary health insurance. "Seniors, they take our word for it, so yes, we offer them contracts that potentially are not useful for their needs, but behind that, we know that we will have the objective met.

We have a duty to advise, we must avoid anything that is an abuse of weakness or anything else, but sometimes, profitability was more important", Jérémy still remembers. Commissions at 9% of contributions on average in an individual contractA broker, this is therefore not a guarantee of having good advice. But what consequences does this really have on the price of our contribution?

After several refusals from different brokerage firms, we pretended to be one of them. And we go to the Brokerage Show, equipped with a hidden camera. We discover that most brokers are paid through commissions which can cause the price of our contracts to skyrocket.

There is, for example, the linear commission: "Initially, it's linear, so it's 15, 18 or 20%", we are told. Let's take this example of a broker with a 15% commission. If he manages to sell a contract at 100 euros per month excluding taxes, he will receive 15 euros in commission each month for the entire of this policyholder's contract.

Machine-translated from French