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

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Georges, 78 years old, pays his complementary health insurance 195 euros each month. In ten years, its contribution has doubled for the same level of guarantee. 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. “We never read pages like that,” he assures us.

Illegible contracts and spiraling prices are pushing the French to want to change mutual insurance companies. To see things more clearly, they 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 comparison sites. The goal was to call as many customers as possible, to call all the time. There are figures to be made, we had very significant pressure,” he explains.

According to Jérémy, 80% of his clients were seniors, those who pay the most for their complementary health insurance. “Seniors take our word for it, so we offer them contracts that are potentially not useful for their needs. But behind us, 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,” admits Jérémy.

Commissions at 9% of contributions on average in an individual contract

A broker 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, the "Cash Investigation" team pretends to be one of them and goes to the Brokerage Show, equipped with a hidden camera. We discover that most brokers are paid through commissions which can cause contract prices 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, throughout the duration of the policyholder's contract. “Is this 15% commission added to the insured’s contribution?” asks “Cash Investigation”, on a hidden camera. “That’s it, absolutely. So in fact, he doesn’t see the commission,” we are told.

The existence of a commission is necessarily written in the contract, but its amount is never mentioned. Nothing illegal, but these practices have a direct impact on reimbursements. Their cost is part of the acquisition costs of complementary health insurance. In an individual contract, this represents on average 9% of the contribution.