Kam Elto
KILL-EM-QUICK
RISE of LEGION
187
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Posted - 2014.02.11 15:21:00 -
[1] - Quote
Brief history of the Insurance Racket
Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a fire. A nice family's house burned right to the ground while they were away, and the nice family suddenly had no place to live, no food to eat and only the clothes on their backs. This happened when ordinary people didn't have bank accounts and didn't have much to put into one anyway, so the nice family had to rely on friends and neighbors to help them.
The friends and neighbors did indeed help, the family's community being kind and caring. But for quite a while it was a very tough time for everybody involved. During this difficult period considerable discussion about the golden rule, "Treat others as you would like to be treated," and the acknowledgement, "It could happen to anybody," began to blend into a new idea: If all the families in the community put just a little money into one pot, say every month, in a year or so there would be enough to help out any of them who suffered a calamity - well, so long as several calamities didn't happen at once, of course - and no one family would be devastated, separated or forced to rely on others.
After many an argument and much working out of details the community agreed to give it a try. They voted the person known by everybody to be the most honest and honorable of all of them to keep the pot of money, and others to count the money every month to verify it was safe and intact, and used only for the right reasons.
To everybody's surprise and delight, it worked. There were catastrophes now and again over the years, but even so the money in the pot grew to quite a sum, a lot of victims of bad fortune were relieved of financial strain, and everybody felt a little more secure.
Once upon a time a long time ago, insurance was born! And while it looked at first as though everybody would live happily ever after, that didn't quite happen.
Oddly enough whenever money accumulates people get anxious. The community began to fret about keeping it safe, if those who received it really deserved it, etc. Also, when money accumulates, other people are drawn to it, seeing opportunities. Before too long, professional money managers replaced the now-aging people everybody had previously trusted to take care of it, and after that, as the pot of money continued to grow, a corporation took over the job.
Sadly, the first concern was no longer to take care of people in need. It became to make more money, every corporation's primary job. To accomplish this new goal the corporation began screening people out, making sure those most likely to need help would not get it because that would cost the corporation money. They put new restrictions on those who wanted to buy insurance, and new restrictions on how much they would pay for any specific condition or happening. They added many forms to be filled out, and many layers of people to design the forms to make them most advantageous to the corporation, and to analyze them for inaccuracies when they were filed, in order to delay or prevent payments out. Owners of the corporation and the people who ran it became very rich, doing nothing more than managing a community's money - for the exclusive benefit of the corporations' owners and executives.
Insurance companies do not manufacture anything, do not design or engineer anything, and do not contribute anything to the agencies that heal people's lives after a disaster - not to hospitals, nursing homes, fire departments, police departments, foster care, social programs, or to any body designed actually to help people, except by paying the limited benefits promised under policies bought and paid for by victims. If those people did not "qualify" for insurance, could not afford it or failed to pay their premiums, they do not receive anything at all. Insurance companies only manage money. All the enormous profits they make come from premium payments, the money people put into a pot to share in an emergency. These days insurance benefits come from what's left in the pot after profit is taken out.
How a system created to help those in need became a system to make some people rich is difficult to understand. It might be called a fairy tale. In any case today, at the end of the tale as at the beginning, kind and caring friends and neighbors are once again helping unfortunate victims of calamities - because so many people have no insurance, and not much money either. |