In our previous blogpost, we looked at the situation of the Integrated Plans insurers in in Singapore, who have long complained that they have not been profitably since the introduction of Medishield Life in 2015. This has since attracted quite a bit of attention, and in the process, some questions and further data have been thrown up, which we shall examine here.

Purpose of the article

The purpose of the first article was to understand why the Integrated Plans insurers were not more profitable in the past 5 years, from the perspective of the insurer. Of course, there have been a couple of successful cases, such as Prudential, which has been profitable for 2 years in a row, and NTUC Income, which was profitable in 2019. This task is made harder because insurance is not a particularly transparent industry. The business economics differ significantly from product to product and usually involves some arcane actuarial mathematics to boot!...