Insurance Week

Suddenly, we're swamped with insurance concerns:

1. Life insurance - do we buy it here?

2. Homeowner's insurance - we have it, we have to renew it - do we shop around?  

3. Health insurance - should we buy one of the supplemental policies?

For all of these questions, we have a friendly insurance agent.

Thing is, we don't quite know how we got him.  See, we got a call that our homeowner's insurance was about to expire and we have to renew it.  OK, sounds reasonable.

Then we got a call from someone who said he wanted to come over and talk to us about our insurance needs.  We THINK his call was connected to the earlier call, but we're not altogether sure.  

He came over and we had a nice, long discussion about various insurance needs.  

Health insurance: He thought we should get supplemental health insurance.  We filled out the forms.  We went to the doctor to get a "health report" which did not (surprise!) involve any kind of physical exam, it was just a piece of paper.  But our doctor did tell us that we were crazy to want supplemental health insurance - so that was interesting.

We now wait to see how much they want to charge us for the supplemental health insurance.

Homeowner's insurance: Then someone called and said he was an appraiser, and needed to come to our house for our homeowner's insurance.

We THINK he's connected to our actual homeowner's insurance agency, which we THINK is the company that sent the other guy.

See, there are sub-companies with different names and...oh, forget it.  I'll just confuse you.

So the appraiser comes by and does his thing a few days ago.

Then the insurance company calls and we have this conversation:

"Our appraiser has to come by."  

"No, he already came!"

"Impossible, he could not have already come"

"But he did, two days ago."

"Impossible."

So then we look at each other - who WAS this guy who came over?  He seemed official enough (not that any Israeli professional wears any kind of uniform aside from jeans and a sweater).  He had all kinds of forms and stuff. When we asked for a business card, he wrote his email address down on a piece of scrap paper. hmmmmm....

Car insurance: Then there's the saga of the car accident...

We were billed for the ambulance.  We were told that our health insurance would cover it.  They do not.  We are told by the health insurance company to take this to the car insurance company.  They insist on us faxing (the faxing here drives me crazy - come on, start-up nation, scan the darn things and email them!) over paperwork.  We do it.  They get it.  They now tell us it is in the hands of someone else.  Bye-bye, 494 shekel.

And...most of the above discussions and transactions took place in Hebrew.  We greatly improved our vocabulary during these conversations.  So there's that.