The soaring cost of health insurance is crippling employers and threatening job creation and salary levels, a new study suggests.The overall cost of premiums rose from Dh9.9 billion in 2013 to Dh11.1bn in 2014, an increase of more than 12 per cent, according to the Insurance Authority.

The cost of premiums is also outstripping the cost of healthcare itself, which is estimated to have risen by about 9 per cent a year between 2008 and 2013."This is an increasingly serious concern to employers as a growing proportion of the total cost of employment," says the study, carried out by the research company YouGov for International SOS, a medical and travel security risk services company.

According to Timetric research, life insurance penetration rates in the UAE were less than 1 per cent in 2014, which suggests that more than 90 per cent of the population are not insured. This is far behind other developed Asian economies such as Taiwan (15.3 per cent) and South Korea (9.2 per cent)."The number of people without life insurance in the UAE could even be lower than 1 per cent," commented a source at one of the major insurance firms in Dubai.

What is alarming, according to HSBC, is that 65 per cent of people in the country think that it is someone else's responsibility to provide financial stability to their families if something were to happen to them and they're no longer able to work.

The spate of fires, floods, and damage to property due to accidents or thunderstorms in recent months should make people be proactive and not reactionary in protecting their personal belongings at home, insurers say. Residents of the two towers in the Ajman One cluster that were damaged on Monday night fear the worst -- losing everything they own to the fire.

Many of the residents Gulf News spoke to do not have home contents insurance that would have helped them in emergencies like this.Just two weeks ago, a fire broke out in a residential building in Abu Dhabi injuring 15 people. A week before that, torrential rain flooded many communities in Jebel Ali, with two-foot flood waters damaging furniture and appliances in people's homes.