Sir, – Conor Pope's report on health insurance ("Pricewatch: Is the cost of your health insurance making you feel ill?", January 24th) properly recommends that people should regularly review their health insurance by exploring alternative plans with their insurer or another company.
However, while the Health Insurance Authority (HIA) provides a facility on its website for comparing alternative plans provided by both your insurer and other health insurance providers, this is not quite as easy as it might seem.
A look at the HIA website reveals that, between the four insurers currently providing health insurance, there are in excess of 300 different plans available to choose from.
With such a plethora of plans available, it can be quite a task to identify the most appropriate or suitable plan.
Surely it should be possible to reduce the range of plans to a much smaller and more manageable number, or is the number of plans a deliberate ploy by insurers to confuse customers and facilitate greater profitability for the companies? – Yours, etc,
JOHN GILLEN,
Skerries, Co Dublin.