OPINION: The one thing people need to know about their life insurer is whether it will pay at claims time.
And yet, that's one thing people buying life insurance don't get to see.
We buy our insurances for life, trauma, income protection and loans from banks, advisers, lenders, in the supermarket and online.
But nowhere in our buying process are we able to see whether the insurer we are considering is in the habit of declining alarming numbers of claims compared to other insurers.
The Reserve Bank and Financial Markets Authority (FMA) have just torn a strip off the life insurance industry in a "conduct" report.
The industry is complacent, it's focused on profits and sales not the customer, and it pays such large commissions that insurance advisers are encouraged to "churn" policies every few years and earn a fresh set of commissions.
Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr said: "The industry must act urgently and undergo major change to address these weaknesses, as their services are vulnerable to misconduct and the escalation of issues that have been seen in other countries."
When it's designing insurance policies, and selling them, the Reserve Bank and FMA found, the focus was not on whether they were good for the people they were selling them too. It published a similarly critical conduct report on banks last year.
Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr and FMA chief executive Rob Everett declined to name the insurers responsible for some particularly egregious bits of misconduct included in the report.
Yet that's exactly what we, the public want to know.
Which insurers can we trust, and which are happy to exploit policyholders?
Without knowing that, how can the $2.6 billion life insurance market function like a market, with good insurers being rewarded, and bad insurers having to change their ways in order to stay in business?
The life insurance industry has meekly responded to the report, and accepted it has to change.
The Government has responded with the Cabinet voting to fast-track laws putting duties on banks and insurers to prioritise the interests of their customers.
Rob Everett, chief executive of the Financial Markets Authority, said: "Overall the report shows the life insurance sector in a poor light."
The protections should include measures to give the public the information it needs to exert informed consumer choice.
Life insurance is an industry with a singular lack of transparency, making it hard for people to know which to trust.
We simply don't know how often insurers decline claims, because they don't have to tell us.
We don't know which insurers are the worst at paying claims, and which are the best.
We don't know which insurers have the worst "lapse rates", indicating high levels of disgruntled policyholders stopping paying premiums, and cancelling their policies.
The life insurers don't have to publish details of the commissions they pay to advisers, and resellers like banks, on their websites.
If the public had this information, consumers could start making more informed decisions.
And insurers would have to respond.
One of the dirty secrets of the life insurance industry is declining claims for "non-disclosure", which means turning down claims because the policyholder did not tell the insurer something important when they took out their policy.
While that sounds like the fault of the policyholder (and certainly is in cases of fraud), it can also be the result of the insurer not explaining the information they need, and prioritising a quick sale.
An insurer with a high rate of non-disclosure claims declines would be forced to sort its sales model out, if it had to report the figures publicly.
One insurer told me on Tuesday that decline rates for non-disclosure were low, and publishing them would dispel a lot of distrust about the industry.
Well, let's do it then.
Sometimes when politicians lose trust in an industry, they force transparency to make the market work better.
Lenders are forced by law to reveal their interest rates, fees and contracts on their websites.
Fund managers are forced to account quarterly to their investors.
When the Government gets to fast-tracking its insurance law reforms, it should consider how to mandate the transparency consumers need to make the life insurance market function properly.