I have health insurance for myself and my family, and have been mostly happy with my provider. So much so that even with the myriad of television, radio and press advertising that is currently bombarding me, I have not been motivated to change to another fund. (It is tax time so the tax relief benefit is being heavily promoted).

The fact is that all the various messages being forced at me through these mediums are pretty much the same, and the effort of changing funds is something I don’t really want to waste my time thinking about, let alone filling in paperwork for.

These advertisements of sameness all spout how happy and shiny our lives will be if we join their fund, they don’t differentiate themselves enough, whereas social media on the other hand connects with the viewer.

Social media is real, it is not an artificially scripted story of young, oh sooo happy models with perfect teeth doing yoga while the sun glints on them like a golden halo.

It is the real experiences of people traumatised by sudden illness or tragedies, in unexpected situations where they aren’t looking like supermodels, and are certainly not laughing.

Case in point is a friend of my wife’s friend (that’s the reach of social media) telling his story on Facebook about how his fund really let him down. He was admitted to hospital on a weekend, and even though he has private health insurance, was told by hospital staff that it was too much paper work to transfer him to a private room, so he ended up in a room with numerous other patients.

A few days later he was advised that he would most likely be going home the next day, but in case he needed to stay longer, he would be held in the hall until a bed became available.

The question here (apart from the state of the hospital system) is what good was his fund?

Now this ‘advertisement’ is being broadcast to a mass audience (by the amount of comments on Facebook, rather large I would say). This form of media has certainly got a lot of people looking into changing or even ending their health insurance.

In particular this ‘real life advert’ has actually worked (unlike the traditional medias) in getting me to actively look into whether or not I have the right fund for our family, because trust me, we aren’t like the ‘happy perfect’ family as those portrayed on television.