Letter of the Week:
What has happened to the insurance industry?
“By definition, insurance is socialistic. It takes monies from large groups and redistributes them to group members when they need it.
After its agents take their cut and its brokers take their cut and its managers take their cut and its executives take their cut and its officers take their cut and its directors take their cut and its shareholders take their cut and its lobbyists advancing insurance law against covering us take their cut and its lawyers crafting policies and cases against paying us take their cut and its opulent offices are paid for and its miscellaneous expenses are met and its workforce gets paid, the remaining fractions of the monies taken from us they redistribute to us when we need it—theoretically.
There are 54,000 salaried board directors in the insurance sector, and hundreds of thousands of highly-paid officers like presidents, CEOs and vice presidents of marketing, whose cuts amount to billions and billions of our dollars. Their bonus incentives are tied to profits, not positivities in consumer outcomes, so their primary objective is to outdo one another redundantly marketing the same pack of products to thereby maximize their own personal incomes, rather than to maximize the benefits redistributed to us, the customers. They’re always working on ways of grabbing more of our monies, directly through premiums, etc., and indirectly via taxpayer-subsidized insurance markets.
There are hundreds of lobbyists raking in dozens of millions of insurance dollars tilting our laws to maximize insurance profits. Gimmicks like copays and donut-holes are legal for that and that reason only, not to benefit us, the policyholders. We’re voters, too, btw.
There are hundreds of thousands of lawyers taking hundreds of millions of insurance dollars to help it weasel out of obligations.
We are required by law to buy insurance, taxpayer subsidized if need be, therefore it is not in a free market, but it is in a completely saturated one—the only way individual insurance companies can get new customers is to poach them off competitors, each claiming their identical product is better than all the others while saying as little as possible about it and burying useful information. These marketing activities yearly cost the Insurance industry $14 billion not redistributed to us.
All of those megabuck boards of directors could be replaced by one House and one Senate oversight committee and a handful of subcommittees, for free. All those gigabuck officers could be replaced by one government agency, a bargain at any price considering our monies would be shepherded by civil servants who, by and large, devote their working lives to serving the greater good, instead of being hoarded by self-entitling plutocrats who don’t even get that concept.
Wouldn’t need the marketers anymore, nor the lobbyists, nor probably three-quarters of the insurance lawyers, none of whom are working toward our benefit, mostly working against us with our own monies.
Insurance is privatized. Privatization is touted by certain leadership as the best protection against purported ‘waste, fraud, and abuse.’
Competing to profit off a socialistic function like insurance or Social Security corrupts it against its own mission, and does nothing more than suck up resources that should be put to intended uses like care and support in our hour of need, and is therefore a monstrous, colossal waste.
And just because they used our monies to make it legal, keeping people guessing what they’re paying for and selling services and using the proceeds to employ lawyers to get out of providing those services is still surefire fraud.
And lining their pockets with monies we are forced by law to pay them is absolutely capital-‘A’ Abuse.
Claims that privatization protects us from waste, fraud, and abuse are plutocratic propaganda—groundwork for that ilk to bilk us and milk us.
Another propagandistic ploy—’free market competition generates efficiencies, which ultimately benefit consumers’—is quite often true in free markets like toys, hospitality, and lawn care. Except insurance is not in a free market. It’s in a forced, subsidized, saturated market, where all a company can do to survive is prey. And look who’s getting served.
Must-have social services like insurance don’t belong in any market anyway. We’ve been bamboozled to believe getting eaten by fat cats is better than being serviced by our government, and how they feast and glut.
The first step toward a solution—therefore a better life in a better country—is to reject our force-fed mindset of ‘All Capitalism Good, All Socialism Bad’ and adopt a free-thinking logical mindset like, ‘Capitalism is good in its proper place, and for socialistic functions, socialistic methods are right, proper, and sensible.’ The next step is then vote that way.”
— Dixon S.
