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| Insurers continue scamming businessowners AROUND THE WORLD! |
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| cdev:
Yes and as long as you dont change it one bit you'll likely be able to keep it, but change anything (like leaving the EU) or join some new FTA and the likelihood is almost 100% that unless you have totally incorruptible politicians who really know their stuff and CARE, you'll have to conform your system to the rules. Just like with building codes. Change anything and they will make me clean up any and all code violations. In the US those code violations are things like what we call Medicare and Social Security, a public retirement and healthcare system that we inherited from the last century, pre WTO. So its days are numbered. The info is buried in a document in Geneva from 1994, an Annex. Not far from the info as to why the 2008 Global Financial Crisis really occurred. Its really a crazy situation, thats causing a lot of dishonesty in high places. --- Quote from: langwadt on December 21, 2020, 02:42:07 am --- --- Quote from: cdev on December 21, 2020, 02:29:14 am ---People who have higher risk exposure and the older people always have to pay more. Also, the more wealthy your zip code, the less you likely have to pay because wealthy people are healthier. Right now they use zip codes but they would prefer to use your cell phone location data to price your insurance. Also genetics. thats likely going to come back and be used to price your health insurance. They'll figure in what they know (mostly what you have told them, but in some countries they have generations of data on families and relative health) Also if you get COVID-19 you'll likely soon have to pay a lot more for the rest of your life, or accept that nothing related to it is covered at all. --- End quote --- around here health insurance is paid via tax so the wealthy actually pays more ... --- End quote --- Its probably still up to countries how they handle taxation, but what they do with their money is limited more and more, if they have any competition from the commercial sector at all, even if there is only one competitor. Also what is competition? Its anything in a like service which it turns out means anything which can substitute for anything else, so even if you think of healthcare as, well healthcare, its also "like" health insurance. So if you sell insurance, public thing cannot compete with it. But by bit. and soon it can only help those who the market totally fails. Then the number of rules that apply increases exponentially, zap, and if they are subsidizing or regulating something especially, in our case financial services, it must conform to dozens of rules, including a ceiling established way back in 1998. When they had none of the 2010 relaxations, And if it doesn't its supposed to be eliminated or reduced in scope. Unless what is being done is an "emergency safeguard measure". That seems to be able to last as long as ten years, so 2020...however itsup to their discretion, so we recently had the coronavirus which is arguably a bigger emergency than the 2010 crisis as far as health, but Trump took a different approach and may have used up that emergency completely by picking such a short and abbreviated response just for people who had a contagious disease who were verified and obviously could not work. So, suppose we revisit the question.. If its "a real emergency", they get to break rules temporarily. How long? I think the honest answer is the least possible time, but for some situations they likely got a lot of leeway because nobody wants this to embarass aybody in the media. They aren't about to break their own rules, no matter what. So they need an emergency to break the hard and fast rules. However, there are a bunch of different kinds of laws, and its clear they shouldnt just create emergencies when they want to break these rules, or make one up. But who knows, I wouldn't put that beyond some of them at all. Also, generally all new "measures" of every kind imaginable , a very very broad term, must be be "not more burdensome than necessary to ensure the quality of the service" What does that mean? It means that it needs to be the very least possible, and that politicians cannot compromise as they used to, it always has to deregulate. And the status quo gets more restrictive, never less. (but they call that deregulation because its the corporations view) That is actually the core principle of US trade policy on services, it seems to me. The OECD now has a 'STRI" or Services Trade Restrictiveness Index" its actually one of at lest two of these indices that purport to tell countries what they can do to remain compliant. But it does not include health insurance, maybe it doesn't include any insurance. But lots of other kinds of regulation are evaluated for their relative trade restrictiveness. Anyway, I cant talk about this any more. Insurance is a scam, I totally agree. |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: S. Petrukhin on December 20, 2020, 11:39:25 am ---Do not think that I am a communist, but in the USSR, insurance companies were state - owned and budget money was sent to cover losses. That is, the payment was guaranteed by the whole country - there was no gambling. Maybe the market economy is not so good against the background of socialism? :) --- End quote --- As always, it is a matter of context. I mean, even the most capitalistic person, if they are sane and happy, will apply socialist rules within their own family. It is well known that statistically, human behaviour changes drastically depending on the size of the interacting group. Groups with at most a couple of thousand members will see less crime/offences/destructive behaviour per person than larger groups. Small groups like families and co-operatives (and some other company forms) can work very, very efficiently using "socialism" internally, but when interacting with clients, competitors, and other companies, "capitalism" seems to work better. One day, about two decades ago, when I was still running a small IT company as CEO and partial owner, I got called a socialist and a communist, and a filthy capitalist the same day. (It was because I did not, and still do not believe patents are proper protection for software and other immaterial discoveries; I'd prefer a different form of purchaseable model protection with much shorter timespans. Not because I think it would be more "moral" or socially proper; because I think the marketplace competition would be better, more effective, bringing overall more stuff to the market, than the current patent system. I don't think people really know what these terms mean, and how context-dependent they really are.) Then there is the distinctive matter of public services (or public utilities), that are necessary to maintain the society and/or culture, and en-franchise new members. Like access to breathable air, energy, clean water, waste handling, and even internet access, today. When it comes to insurance and banking, there are very good arguments for all different kinds of approaches. In some ways, fiat currency generated by banks is extremely dangerous (it enables a rent-seeking gambler class with basically zero risk, simply because they own the banks); yet at the same time, putting banks under political control is just as dangerous: politicians tend to seek more and more power for themselves, not less. Similarly for insurance: there is no guarantee a state-controlled insurance scheme has any better rules than one based on competitive markets; and if those running the state-controlled insurance system have no incentive to not do mistakes and waste money, there really isn't anything other than internal sense of morality for them to do their job properly. Which comes back to my own argument, once again. (I apologize for repeating it! Seriously!) It is the rules that matter, not who gets to set them. Exploiters and scam artists only flourish when the rules allow them to. By accepting scams as a price for doing business, one is the real source of evil, because oneself is at the position to stop it, but chooses not to. The scammers themselves are just finding their niches in the ecology. Exploiters rely on their social skills, and as long as social skills are appreciated over the results of their actions, we'll have more and more exploiters around. |
| T3sl4co1l:
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on December 21, 2020, 04:43:27 am ---It is well known that statistically, human behaviour changes drastically depending on the size of the interacting group. Groups with at most a couple of thousand members will see less crime/offences/destructive behaviour per person than larger groups. Small groups like families and co-operatives (and some other company forms) can work very, very efficiently using "socialism" internally, but when interacting with clients, competitors, and other companies, "capitalism" seems to work better. --- End quote --- Many metrics scale as the 4/3 power of city size, or organization (or indeed, organism, in terms of metabolism and so on). Economic productivity scales up, but so does crime rate, etc. Make of that what you will. Tim |
| Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on December 21, 2020, 06:25:13 am --- --- Quote from: Nominal Animal on December 21, 2020, 04:43:27 am ---It is well known that statistically, human behaviour changes drastically depending on the size of the interacting group. Groups with at most a couple of thousand members will see less crime/offences/destructive behaviour per person than larger groups. Small groups like families and co-operatives (and some other company forms) can work very, very efficiently using "socialism" internally, but when interacting with clients, competitors, and other companies, "capitalism" seems to work better. --- End quote --- Many metrics scale as the 4/3 power of city size, or organization (or indeed, organism, in terms of metabolism and so on). Economic productivity scales up, but so does crime rate, etc. Make of that what you will. --- End quote --- Human population density is also one of the best predictors for the statistics of political views within a single culture, too. You can see this in elections and polls, as the difference in political stance between urban and non-urban areas. To me, this just means that the appropriate algorithm/approach/ruleset depends on the context. I like co-operative business models for example for providing services or selling produce; but a regulated competitive market for business in general. Change the scale, and my "political stance" turns 180°, one could say; but it's just because at different situations, different rules are needed. And, because situations evolve, rules must evolve too. Which leads to status quo proponents being the biggest enablers of evil. Or perhaps the second biggest enablers. The biggest ones are those who insist that even though in the past, these rules have lead to millions of people being killed either directly or due forced famine or even genocide, this time they will work perfectly and everyone will be happy, if only everyone behaves, thinks, and talks exactly like I say. It's not like these scammers – be they insurance companies who never intend to fulfill the contract anyway, or uBeam-like bullshit peddlers – are anything new. They flourish wherever people choose to not do anything about them, or hell, even protect them because they look nice and spout comfortable nonsense, and the harm they do doesn't affect me personally, only those who deserve to be exploited anyway... |
| cdev:
My uncle told me that the main function of insurance was social and it was to keep people participating in the economy without fear. |
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