The number of health and private medical insurance (PMI) complaints soared by almost a third last year, according to data from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Complaints about life and critical illness protection products also grew during 2021 but by a much smaller margin, while income protection grievances dipped.
The FCA figures showed that medical and health insurance complaints rose 29% to 221,069 – up from 171,496 in 2020.
For the whole of life, term assurance and critical illness product category complaints were also up to 43,549 in 2021 from 42,232 in 2020.
Income protection and other accident, sickness and unemployment product complaints dropped by 24% to 2,761 from 3,636.
Complaints about protection packaged multi products inched up to 356 from 315. The only product group to record a decline in complaints was other pure protection which was down from 1,394 to 715.
However, the insurance and pure protection product group, whch includes all general insurance products such as home and motor, saw the largest decline in complaints received by firms between the first half of 2021 compared with the second half of the year.
The data shows while 890,000 complaints were received for this product group in H1 2021, the figure dropped to 770,000 in the second half of the year.