Winner: Dubious Medical Insurance Provider of the Year "Award"

Mike Henry-controlled Interglobal Limited likes to crow about all the so-called industry "awards" it has won. What Interglobal doesn't mention is that the insurance-buying public does not play any role in choosing the winners.

In fact, the winners are chosen either by the brokers selling the insurance, who are likely to "vote" for their favorite product, giving them another sales tool should their favorite product "win", or by an panel of people who get some free publicity and their photo posted on a website in return for acting as a "judge", who appear to merely pass the awards around from year to year.

These awards are part of a PR campaign created by various trade publications, which use these so-called "awards" to promote their own industry and their customers (advertisers), which are the companies in the industry. Three different trade publications have been identified which annually give out their own version of these so-called "awards". They are:

• Health Insurance Magazine
• Portfolio International
• International Investment

Note by the titles that these are not mainstream magazines for the public, but are for the industry, and in fact, are not even available to the public. There are so many different categories of awards, that almost no company participating in this slick PR scheme goes home empty-handed. Such awards are meaningless if the actual users of the product do not pick the winners.

As health insurance customers play no role whatsoever in selecting the winners, there is therefore nothing democratic at all in this "voting" process, and to use the word "vote" or to use these "awards" in advertising as an implied endorsement of any particular product to unknowing consumers is a serious misrepresentation of facts and borders on fraud.