This is why insurance is so expensive because of the amount of 'brokers' you go through.
I would be surprised if 10% of the money collected gets paid out. - Be interesting to find a figure.
About 28years ago I visited an old established broker in Peterborough where I'd gone for motorbike car &life insurance in the 60 & 70's to see if I could get international insurance for my car & caravan along with medical insurance including repatriation etc sort of thing for a five week driving holiday around Europe for myself and my soon to be wife.
They looked at me like I'd broken out the local asylum 20 min earlier..
Sorry we don't do that any more unless it's for at least £ 20 million of coverage .
So I had to resort to the yellow pages ( The con-mans invoice book ) and do it via several places that were tied to the big boy like Sun Life , Eagal star Hammond , Lloyd's etc . It cost a small fortune .
Sadly the days of the old high street broker who knew where to go & was totally independent are long gone or fast disappearing ..
Now the big boys are inter linked most of the time doing expensive Internet advertising and selling via India , it's likely that they have some tracking in place abroad that indicates a credit check /risk enquiry against your name and or address and that then prompts them to up the quote price.
Despite them being legally forbidden to pass on information between themselves as to what you're trying to buy or look at .
Several times we've tried to get five or six quotes, only to find that all subsequent offerings have leap frogged the price upwards
Now if you could fill out the forms on line anonymously/ pseudo name with an address that's not tied to you , but is tied to the pseudo name , you might be able to do some thing about it .
However as they have every single address and name of every adult with a credit card in the UK tied to one of those official addresses it going to be bloody hard to do it.