Isn't the insurance industry

[hyphenate]

just a more widespread mob protection racket? It seems to me that there is very little to separate them, especially when they're the ones reaping the benefits from human suffering.

[JuniperLea]

1. Health Insurance? I call it "Blood Money"

A lot of people getting rich off denying you coverage.

[hyphenate]

9. I agree

I mostly find auto insurance appalling, because for some there is a desperate need for a car, but they don't have the money to both buy a vehicle AND try to insure it. Something needs to change, and eliminate the middle men (the insurers).

[JuniperLea]

15. In CA it is illegal to drive without insurance...

Yet many do, so many that the insurance companies will charge lawful drivers extra for "uninsured motorist insurance" which just strikes me as odd... If it is illegal to drive without auto insurance, why is it legal to sell uninsured motorist insurance.

I think the whole "desperate need for a car" issue is what does us in. I agree, especially in Los Angeles, you really need a car... or at least for three or four generations it has been ingrained in us that we must all have our own car. The hypnosis was so complete that somewhere between 1950 and 1960, the population knowingly, willingly, and wholeheartedly agreed to dissassemble a wonderful light rail system in favor of freeways. And we all know how great that turned out.

[pnwmom]

2. No.

I don't believe that private insurance is the best way to handle health care, if that's what you're referring to. I'd rather have single-payer.

But I have no problem with car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance, etc.

[Shagbark Hickory]

4. Why not?

They can and do still deny legit claims for the same reasons.

[Riftaxe]

5. So does the government

no system is 100% perfect, however; I would love to regulate all insurance companies to within a penny of profit.

[pnwmom]

6. Denying legitimate claims is a cause for grievance against a particular company.

It doesn't make all insurance companies equivalent to a "protection racket."

The insurance companies aren't CAUSING the risk. They don't make you buy policies in order to keep THEM from burning your house down. Do you even understand what the term "protection racket" means?

[hyphenate]

8. Yes, I do

In many states, including my own, you MUST have auto insurance, or you can't drive legally. You MUST have some form of health insurance in order to avoid horrendous costs if you need to enter an ER. (I'm in Mass.)

For those of us on Medicare, we must select a Plan D in order not to have highly expensive prescriptions. They will then make you pay them in order to charge you slightly less for your pills. Meanwhile, these sane drugs are transported to Canada, where they are then offered to the people of that country for a lot less than what we pay here WITH the insurance.

The insurance companies in many ways control us--they make it such that even the slightest bad situation makes many people quake in fear.

How is that NOT the same as a protection racket of sorts? We have NO choice to make--if we want to drive, we need to pay two groups--the Registry of Motor Vehicles AND an insurer. If we try otherwise, they will arrest you if you get stopped.

If you don't have personal health insurance, you risk your house, your properties and pretty much everything if you don't pony up with a monthly payment to an insurance company.

The Republicans got their way in the Health care bill, where a lot of insurance companies made sure that they were to be included, right or wrong with the bill. Making the government the sole manager of the plan would wipe out the profits of the insurance moguls, so Pukes went and made sure that the third party, the insurance companies, got their share of the moola.

We bitch and moan about the health care bill, and the answer is staring us in the face: kill the middle man, and there will be lots of money to spare.

I think this is wrong, personally. I think insurance companies suck in general, and yes, I've worked at several of them over the years. It's quite startling to see how much of our income is paid to these companies.

These people sit in offices and make sure you are being screwed as much as a gang or mob asking for your money just to "make sure" nothing happens to you or your property. They don't need to actually harm you so much, but their game is to eke out every single penny they can from you, as they pore over actuarial tables with likely outdated information. The insurers are NOT your friends--they are out to make money on both human suffering and on our properties.

If you have a physical disability, they charge you more. If nothing ever happens to you, in the meantime, you have paid countless years of money into their grubby hands for nothing.

Mandatory insurance is essentially blackmail in many ways, and there are people out there who can't afford to pay all this extra money when they are practically on the street in the first place.

[pnwmom]

10. I already told you I don't support private insurance for health care.

But I'm glad we have an auto insurance law in my state. We didn't have one in the past, and so those with insurance had to pay higher premiums in case they were hit by other people who had none. (People were not supposed to go without insurance unless they had the means to pay for any claims against them, but of course that never worked out.)

[Shagbark Hickory]

14. It is a little like a racket in Floree Duh. Ask someone who lives in FL about their homeowners polcy

Or the policy they can't get anymore or the policy they thought they had until they got hit by a hurricane or the policy that became too expensive.

And if you got a mortgage, you gotta have insurance. They make you.

So a protection racket... I believe it is.

[hyphenate]

11. As I mentioned above,

my peeve is partly against auto insurers--it's mandatory here, and while I know that something needs to be done about the possibility of an accident, it still galls me that there isn't a better system. When you buy a car, you have to pay almost out as much as you paid for a vehicle.

I have Prescription Part D on my Medicare, and it makes me angry to see that the insurers in the US STILL pay more for drugs manufactured in the US than people in Canada, for example. It doesn't make sense to me to allow the insurance companies to keep screwing US citizens by making them pay more, even WITH the Part D.

[Shagbark Hickory]

13. Well in fairness, some Mutual (like a co-op sorta) companies, Amica for example...

you get a dividend check once a year. The size of the check depends on whether they had any money left over.
They don't typically pay a dividend for auto but for home they do. Unless you're in floree duh, my understanding is there's never a surplus there.. don't quote me on it.

Very hard and expensive to get a home policy in floree duh now. The companies don't make money there so lot of them not writing new policies.
Of course we had lots of tornados in my state, might not get too much of a refund this year.

It's definitely nice to have some choice when it comes to property and casualty insurance vs health insurance but if you ask me, there should be a government run car insurance office if the government is going to require you to use buy it.

[bemildred]

3. It's definitely a racket.

Unfortunately, the racket was created by our own Congress.

[drpepper67]

7. When someone has a vested interest

in the outcome of a situation, they will do what's in their own best interest, not yours.

And this is how we run healthcare.

Just allowing people to get insurance across state lines would help. But we can't even manage to do that.

[TheKentuckian]

12. "across state lines" is just another deregulation scam that offers junk policies a bit cheaper

than something of use. Or at least more use.

[bvar22]

16. I agree and recced this up to +1

The Insurance Industry, especially the Health Insurance Industry is completely parasitic.
They manufacture NOTHING,
produce NO Wealth (value added),
and increase their PROFIT by DENYING Health Care to sick people.

I'm more angry at the "Centrist" Democratic Party Leadership who protected this parasitic industry during the recent "historic" (bitter sarcasm) Health Insurance Reform.
Rahm recently crowed to a Chamber of Commerce crowd about how the Obama Administration protected the "private" delivery system for Health Care in the USA.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=B2F85DDF-18FE-70B2-A835FE1E7FA8D74C


"There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.
I want us to compete for that great mass of voters that want a party that will stand up for working Americans."
---Paul Wellstone

[Ohio Joe]

17. While I really hate insurance companies...

I do not recall any of them breaking someones legs or burning down their place of business if they refused to buy the insurance.

[The Magistrate]

18. More Like Crooked Book-Makers Than Protection Boyos, Ma'am

Basically, you are betting the company something will happen, and the company is betting it will not. If you pay in more than the company ever pays out to you, the company wins and you lose. Where the thing becomes a racket is in setting the spread, so to speak. A book-maker sets a number of points a team must win by to count as winning, and this is done, in theory anyway, to balance the amounts bet on each team, so that either side has a fifty-fifty shot, and the pay-out is two for one for the winner. But this level can be manipulated so that one side is favored over the other, even though the pay-out remains the same, so that one side bets at, say, three to two, and then gets a two for one pay-out, rather than a three for two. Insurance companies invariably engage in trickery of this sort, constructing the bet, or altering its conditions after it is laid, so that the customer cannot win, and the company cannot lose. Exclusions, cancellations, jacking of premiums, all work towards this end. The real 'business model' of insurance nowadays is not to collect premiums, invest the fund so accumulated, pay out claims, and have profit left over, but rather it is to collect premiums, invest the fund, and contrive by hook or by crook to pay out no claims at all....

[Bigmack]

19. Unnecessary middle-men sucking profit ....

from the system.

If SocSec's admin costs are about a third of private investment funds, and Medicare's admin costs are about a third of those or private health care insurance, I wonder how much we could save on auto, home, motorcycle, mortgage, etc insurance with government-run insurance.

But that would be Socialism.....

Eggzakitically!