Real needs
Real needs
Posted 00:18am (Mla time) Feb 17, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 17, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
WHEN our son was still a child, my wife Tita took out a high school plan for him with Platinum Plans. We are not rich, and we were in especially bad shape then. We thought we would put our minds to rest on how to send him through school later on. The plan was small, insignificant even by the standards of the early 1990s, but it brought some psychological balm. No small thanks to the pat on the back you got from the company about doing well to secure your kid's future.
Years later, our kid and the plan matured -- our kid enough to go to high school, the plan not nearly enough to pay for his school bus. Inflation and the runaway cost of education had flattened the plan to the ground like a tsunami a village by the sea. Still, money was money and last year, Tita went out to get what paltry sum was due us. She went to the Platinum Plans office on Buendia Avenue, a gleaming structure that spoke of bedrock stability. She was asked to come back in a month to claim her check. She did, braving the traffic to get to Makati (we live in Quezon City). The processing was fast, the check was postdated. All was right with the world.
Or so it seemed. Shortly after Tita deposited the check, she was notified by the bank that it had bounced. She chalked this up to an oversight of the company and braved the traffic again to go back to the gleaming, bedrock-stable, edifice on Buendia. This time a crowd milled at the office. Most of the other petitioners (for that was how they looked) had substantial policies, some P100,000 or more. Some had come from as far away as Tuguegarao and Bicol. All had the same problem: their checks had bounced.
Only minor clerks were there to face them. My wife asked for the manager, but no one seemed to know where he was. The customer relations officer materialized after Tita refused to get into a waiting game with them and complained loudly. The officer was not apologetic, he was indifferent. The only reason he entertained Tita was that she had made a fuss. He disappeared after they spoke, leaving the others to wait.
The company issued a check. Again, Tita deposited it. Again, it bounced. Again, she braved traffic to get to the gleaming bedrock-stable edifice. Again, a crowd was there with the complaint that their checks had bounced. Again, clerks were there but no one entertained questions. The claimants were now boiling with anger.
By dint of threatening to call the media there and then, Tita got an official to face them and explain how they stood. The fellow said the good news was that they would now be paid in cash. The bad news was that only some of them would get paid, specifically the ones with smaller claims. The rest had to come back some other day. Groans and moans and curses issued from the throats of the crowd, but short of burning the place down (which they all wanted to do; only the thought they might never recover their money for their children's college kept them from doing so), they felt powerless to do anything.
Tita did get our cash after some time, a very small amount that one could only want to go through all this for because of what it represented. (We don't know if the others have.)
Tita has asked me to write this for some time now, believing the others are still there gnashing their teeth, their minds filled alternately with thoughts of despair and murder. The recent hullabaloo over pre-need companies has given me added reason to do so.
I don't know that Platinum Plans is typical of pre-need companies. The torrent of complaints against College Assurance Plan, stemming from its inability to meet claims, suggests it is so. Indeed, I suspect the problem is more widespread than supposed. Some senators have already spoken out against CAP in particular, saying its figures clearly show it is not in any position to pay its planholders, now or in the foreseeable future. The problem isn't just that, it is their sheer lack of transparency, or indeed lack of manners.
I caught Perfecto Yasay on ANC last week accusing Senators Mar Roxas and Serge Osmeña of being reckless to have depicted CAP the way they did. It amounted to killing the company, he said, as it stood to stampede planholders into its doors. Indeed, it stood to sow public distrust over pre-need companies. Gene Orejana, who was interviewing him, was rightly unsympathetic. He wasn't a policyholder himself, Orejana said, he had heard enough bad press about them from the start to want to be so. His question was: What do you do about the people who feel cheated of their life savings?
It is a very good question, and one echoed by Roxas himself in Tina Monzon-Palma's show on the same topic. This is one time I agree with Roxas 100 percent. To begin with, he said, the plan already reeks of a rip-off. Only 40 percent of what you give to the pre-need companies actually goes to meet your children's future education, 60 percent goes to agents' fees and company expenses. Quite apart from that-and this is the part I agree with entirely -- why is our perspective how to keep business protected? Why isn't our perspective how to protect the public?
It's the public that's completely exposed and vulnerable in all this, like nipa huts in a gathering storm. What this has spawned is an attitude from the companies that the public is there to be fleeced, there's precious little to prevent them from doing so, they can always buy their way out of a mess. Worse, what it has spawned is an attitude from the public of resignation, of looking to heaven and not to earth for justice or vengeance. This is one time I most assuredly approve of the latter. We do not have consumer rights in this country, and pre-need firms have merely served to drive home that fact.
That is what we need before anything else.
Posted 00:18am (Mla time) Feb 17, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 17, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
WHEN our son was still a child, my wife Tita took out a high school plan for him with Platinum Plans. We are not rich, and we were in especially bad shape then. We thought we would put our minds to rest on how to send him through school later on. The plan was small, insignificant even by the standards of the early 1990s, but it brought some psychological balm. No small thanks to the pat on the back you got from the company about doing well to secure your kid's future.
Years later, our kid and the plan matured -- our kid enough to go to high school, the plan not nearly enough to pay for his school bus. Inflation and the runaway cost of education had flattened the plan to the ground like a tsunami a village by the sea. Still, money was money and last year, Tita went out to get what paltry sum was due us. She went to the Platinum Plans office on Buendia Avenue, a gleaming structure that spoke of bedrock stability. She was asked to come back in a month to claim her check. She did, braving the traffic to get to Makati (we live in Quezon City). The processing was fast, the check was postdated. All was right with the world.
Or so it seemed. Shortly after Tita deposited the check, she was notified by the bank that it had bounced. She chalked this up to an oversight of the company and braved the traffic again to go back to the gleaming, bedrock-stable, edifice on Buendia. This time a crowd milled at the office. Most of the other petitioners (for that was how they looked) had substantial policies, some P100,000 or more. Some had come from as far away as Tuguegarao and Bicol. All had the same problem: their checks had bounced.
Only minor clerks were there to face them. My wife asked for the manager, but no one seemed to know where he was. The customer relations officer materialized after Tita refused to get into a waiting game with them and complained loudly. The officer was not apologetic, he was indifferent. The only reason he entertained Tita was that she had made a fuss. He disappeared after they spoke, leaving the others to wait.
The company issued a check. Again, Tita deposited it. Again, it bounced. Again, she braved traffic to get to the gleaming bedrock-stable edifice. Again, a crowd was there with the complaint that their checks had bounced. Again, clerks were there but no one entertained questions. The claimants were now boiling with anger.
By dint of threatening to call the media there and then, Tita got an official to face them and explain how they stood. The fellow said the good news was that they would now be paid in cash. The bad news was that only some of them would get paid, specifically the ones with smaller claims. The rest had to come back some other day. Groans and moans and curses issued from the throats of the crowd, but short of burning the place down (which they all wanted to do; only the thought they might never recover their money for their children's college kept them from doing so), they felt powerless to do anything.
Tita did get our cash after some time, a very small amount that one could only want to go through all this for because of what it represented. (We don't know if the others have.)
Tita has asked me to write this for some time now, believing the others are still there gnashing their teeth, their minds filled alternately with thoughts of despair and murder. The recent hullabaloo over pre-need companies has given me added reason to do so.
I don't know that Platinum Plans is typical of pre-need companies. The torrent of complaints against College Assurance Plan, stemming from its inability to meet claims, suggests it is so. Indeed, I suspect the problem is more widespread than supposed. Some senators have already spoken out against CAP in particular, saying its figures clearly show it is not in any position to pay its planholders, now or in the foreseeable future. The problem isn't just that, it is their sheer lack of transparency, or indeed lack of manners.
I caught Perfecto Yasay on ANC last week accusing Senators Mar Roxas and Serge Osmeña of being reckless to have depicted CAP the way they did. It amounted to killing the company, he said, as it stood to stampede planholders into its doors. Indeed, it stood to sow public distrust over pre-need companies. Gene Orejana, who was interviewing him, was rightly unsympathetic. He wasn't a policyholder himself, Orejana said, he had heard enough bad press about them from the start to want to be so. His question was: What do you do about the people who feel cheated of their life savings?
It is a very good question, and one echoed by Roxas himself in Tina Monzon-Palma's show on the same topic. This is one time I agree with Roxas 100 percent. To begin with, he said, the plan already reeks of a rip-off. Only 40 percent of what you give to the pre-need companies actually goes to meet your children's future education, 60 percent goes to agents' fees and company expenses. Quite apart from that-and this is the part I agree with entirely -- why is our perspective how to keep business protected? Why isn't our perspective how to protect the public?
It's the public that's completely exposed and vulnerable in all this, like nipa huts in a gathering storm. What this has spawned is an attitude from the companies that the public is there to be fleeced, there's precious little to prevent them from doing so, they can always buy their way out of a mess. Worse, what it has spawned is an attitude from the public of resignation, of looking to heaven and not to earth for justice or vengeance. This is one time I most assuredly approve of the latter. We do not have consumer rights in this country, and pre-need firms have merely served to drive home that fact.
That is what we need before anything else.
posted by Dante at 12:18 AM
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