The mission of any mature insurance industry is to enable the sustainability of wealth and economic growth. Our main mission during the pandemic has been to sustain, if not to improve, the level of protection that Spain’s social and economic agents had. In addition to honoring our commitments where they have occurred, the task that the insurance sector has embraced since March 14, 2020 was to make the insurance conditions sufficiently flexible to allow anyone who wishes to remain insured to be able to do so. It is a lesson we learned in previous crises: if social and economic adversity leads to a reduction in insurance, then what happens is that those circumstances, already serious in themselves, are further aggravated.
We wanted to be a brake, and not an accelerator, of the serious situation that arose with the arrival of COVID-19; and we get it. A good example of this is the largest collective policy in the history of Spain, drawn up in favor of more than 1 million people who work in health centers and residences in Spain. A life insurance and hospital allowance funded by 109 insurers for those on the front lines in the fight against the pandemic.
When an activity is relevant and capable of responding in difficult circumstances, the normal conclusion is that a future of expansion can be expected. Spanish insurance has historically shown a capacity for growth. If the data is observed with a sufficient time perspective, it can be seen that insurance is about 15 percentage points above the theoretical path that marks the structural evolution of the country’s economy. This is so for two reasons: the first, because Spanish insurance shows somewhat lower density rates than those observed in other advanced economies; and the second, because we tend to improve, day by day, the perception that our clients have of us.
A crucial element of this future is the extent to which projects are carried out in Spain to integrate private insurance into protection schemes designed, supervised and promoted by the public power. This is common currency in many of the countries that surround us and which we want to resemble, notably in the field of the so-called Welfare State.
In our environment, coordinated and adequately tuned environments for both pensions and healthcare provision are common. We would not, of course, be the first to understand the basic concept that the important thing when faced with a challenge or a problem is to solve it, not so much who solves it. Probably, in Spain we need to stop arguing about how we are going to do things in order to give more time to the discussion about what things we will do and what not. If this last debate unfolds, we will soon see that there are many things to do and that we will approach it much better by articulating all the available resources in a single coordinated system.
Insurers, therefore, contemplate the present with the satisfaction of the duty fulfilled, and the future with the desire to display their capacity to provide solutions. The result of this process: a more and better insured society will only consolidate our ability to grow, create wealth, generate well-being and raise our collective standard of living.
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