Insurance is a SCAM! There's a better way!

The Sandbox General
1

Guys, we have to admit we’re the baddies here. Insurance is a mega scam being run by parasites who are sucking the American people dry! Why should anyone put up with this crap?

Let me tell you I know of a better way. Instead of having these evil megacorps scam you out of your hard earned dollars, here’s what we’re gonna do instead.

First, we’re just going to pool our money together and then pay it out as needed with no fat cat millionaire admin hoarding it for himself. Everyone wins!

Ok well I guess we’re going to have to figure out how much to put in so we better hire someone trained in statistics to figure out how much claims are going to cost and then how much should be put in by each person commensurate with their risk but hey they’re just one person so no biggie.

Maybe some people will want to join and leave our pool too so we better hire someone to take care of the influx and outflow of members.

Oh and when claims happen someone’s gotta go out there to evaluate what happened but no big deal just another small expense.

And the money thing and taxes might be need to be handled so we better add some accountants but no big deal it’s just a small expense. And some IT guys to handle the digital ledger.

Well we might need an office to more efficiently coordinate all these people working together but hey everyone needs to pay rent right?

You know what our little collective might need some extra capital to cushion against catastrophic happenings so let’s legally declare it as a corporation so we can issue shares and raise capital. And no it’s not one of THOSE companies it’s the good kind!

And we should trade that catastrophe risk with that other company on the other side of the country so let’s get some finance bros to help us out with swaps.

Every now and then we should also think of acquiring another group like ours if it improves our risk profile so we’ll contract with an investment bank but don’t worry it’ll only be once in a while.

Now things are getting a little complex so we’ll hire a CEO. How much should we pay them? We’ll the going rate seems to be $10M for a competent executive so let’s go with that to make things run well, rather than have us go bankrupt with everyone losing their money.

See! There’s a better way! Take that you stupid greedy insurance companies!

2

But if greedy insurance companies weren’t so greedy, how would some of us get paid our actuary money?

(I’ll concede that as the person who sets the target profit loads for our products, I might have the appearance of a conflict of interest…)

3

The problem with high frequency insurance like health is it being a for profit venture. Usa health insurance is for profit when it probably should not be given the asymmetrical negotiating power medical providers have.

1 Like
4

The problem with insurance (in terms of public perception) is that it only really kicks in once something bad happens.

Death, Sickness, Fire, Flood etc

So naturally, emotions are heightened and any denial of coverage gets magnified to the Nth degree.

This also makes things very difficult for the people making the decisions.

Health Insurance in the US is a classic example.

I personally think they go too far in denying care. The entire system is also opaque by design, which allows intermediaries to extract rents from the entire value chain.

People on the ground see this, and it tends to piss them off even more.

3 Likes
5

You coulda warned me this past summer when we were having drinks!!! :unamused:

I am disappoint. Oh so disappoint… :roll_eyes:

6

Just eliminate third party payment altogether. Then have health services just cost less, and have doctors just accept being paid less.

7

Sounds pretty easy. Why it has not happened before this is beyond all of us.

1 Like
8

Insurance isn’t the scam, capitalism is the scam. Insurance has just been infected by capitalism, so instead of the insurance industry existing to help protect property/health, it’s just become another money funnel from the labor class to the capital class without any care about the societal responsibility our industry should have.

3 Likes
9

The next time somebody says something along the lines of “eliminating the third party payer” I am going to say, “oh, and then we can reduce health service costs by paying docs less - that will be an enormous savings!”

1 Like
10

When you know it’s a colonel smoothie thread before clicking

3 Likes
11

There you go, bringing class into it again

1 Like