I think that I’m in the right, but would appreciate some insight.
(I’ve namechanged for this).
My mother is 86. She learned to drive in her fifties, and has had a car ever since. My father is still alive, and doesn’t drive.
I discovered today that when she renewed her car insurance earlier this year, she deliberately concealed a medical condition. She has been undergoing treatment for macular degeneration for a year.
She’s just acquired a new (to her) car, which arrives next week, and because she goes to pieces when she has to deal with any kind of call centre, I called up on her behalf to ask for her insurance to be adjusted. After I’d made the call, she said, “you didn’t mention my macular degeneration did you?”
I was furious with her. She thinks that everything is ok because she had an eye test at the optician earlier this year, after she’d renewed the insurance having failed to disclose her eye condition, and the optician pronounced her fit to drive.
I don’t know what to do. I’ve had it out with her today and explained to her that she has invalidated her car insurance by concealing her condition. If she crashes her car, no insurance but worse still, if she hits somebody else and injures or kills them, her insurance won’t cover them. I think that she’s committing fraud, as well as being selfish and irresponsible.
None of this cuts any ice with my mother: her response is, “stop going on about it” and when that fails, “you’re really upsetting me now and I can’t cope with the stress at my age”.
She’s worried that her car insurance will go up, but my view is that if you want to carry on driving in your eighties, you need to pay the appropriate car insurance premium. She can’t understand why her premium is almost £1,000 even without disclosing her eye condition. The answer, of course, is that old people have more accidents.
What would you do?
A: tell her that if she doesn’t call her insurers and disclose her condition, I will.
B: leave well alone, on the grounds that she is an adult who can make her own decisions and take her own risks.
(The problem with B, of course, is that it’s not just herself she is putting at risk).