I have been churning insurances for a couple of years or so and I have been pretty happy with how smooth it went as long as I've been churning between the major players such as Bupa and Medibank.
Early this year, I've decided to move to Frank Health Insurance, and that's when the nightmares began:
- Frank, first of all took almost 3 months to key in my information from the previous provider based on the clearance certificate provided, so for that duration I was completely out of pocket as they claims won't go through.
- They only cleared the 6 months of waiting as they said Bupa (previous provider) only provided 3 months of my coverage (where they had my 8 years of coverage) and the next 3 months were already been with Frank
- Upon checking with Bupa, they said they can't send my clearance certificate on email as per their policy so they will send it via post which I'm yet to receive and cross check, so I don't who f**kd me up in the first place.
- Now even after offering the whole clearance certificate with proper timelines from every previous provider, Frank says their systems are not equiped enough to sync that data in from multiple provider so my waiting periods will still won't be waived off and every time I want to claim an item I'll have to call in and they'll have to look at it from the beginning.
in short horrible experience from frank and I'm hearing even from HBF the same, they run lucrative offers to get a huge influx and then struggle to handle their membership and takes forever to get them up and running.
After Ombudsman, the Complaints Officer from Frank admitted in a 1500 words large email she sent, that they did a terrible job, and provided the correct information on in fact how it should have been done in the first place which their representative did not quite know of.
Edit: Another downside is if you are not with them for at least 12 months, the membership pause while you are travelling for a signifiant amount of time, is out of option as well.
The hunter becomes the hunted.