EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: Alex Eisenhut on December 17, 2020, 06:00:12 pm
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Louis's latest rant is great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO8FSjg8J9k (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO8FSjg8J9k)
I can't believe people defend insurance companies that they "have bills too."
I am surprised Louis didn't mention the very real fact that insurance companies are themselves insured, and do not lose a penny. Ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance)
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I only wish he had emphasized that the insurance scamming can only continue for as long as the majority defenders – bootlickers, Louis calls 'em – let them.
To fix this, the rules need to change. And that will not happen until the majority agrees the behaviour is a problem, and that the rules need to be changed. We can't change the insurance companies without changing the rules they operate under.
Put another way, it is the insurance marketplace that currently allows this. Even if you had a company that did not scam its clients, it would soon be out-competed by the scammers, because of the current insurance marketplace rules.
The true villains are not the companies that play by the (too loose) rules, but the wonky rules, and especially the bootlickers that defend the too loose rules: the majority that accepts the current status quo, the "middle of the road" moralists, who do not see anything wrong in the current situation. (I very recently had a nasty rant about exactly that kind of people in another thread in this forum.)
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Insurance companies seem to hate small business. Try to run any kind of business from your garage and see what they say. Heck, some insurance won't even let you put a business decal on your personal car. Cities equally hate small business too and will give you lot of trouble for it.
I see the odd ball small business ran from a home sometimes and they have a sign and everything and I do wonder how much trouble the city and insurance give them.
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Pandemic insurance is bullshit. When a real pandemic comes along, the insurer would have to pay every single one of their clients all simultaneously. Even the re-insurers cannot afford this and they know it. Every insurance company should be out of business within months, especially since by definition a pandemic will disrupt things for a good 2 years at least for many businesses. The insurance company cannot afford to pay everyone all their business expenses country or world wide for 2 years straight...
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Pandemic insurance is bullshit. When a real pandemic comes along, the insurer would have to pay every single one of their clients all simultaneously. Even the re-insurers cannot afford this and they know it. Every insurance company should be out of business within months, especially since by definition a pandemic will disrupt things for a good 2 years at least for many businesses. The insurance company cannot afford to pay everyone all their business expenses country or world wide for 2 years straight...
so it is fraud, they promise something can't and have no intention of delivering?
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Natural catastrophe insurance is an excellent example of the practice.
If the catastrophe is once-in-a-century event, the company claims it was an Act of God, exempted in the fine print.
If the catastrophe is more common, the company claims it was normal, expected weather, and any damages are due to improper preparation for expected weather, and not a natural catastrophe as outlined in the insurance contract.
It does not matter if the insurance company cannot describe any event that the insurance would have covered. It can, quite legally, argue both the above points as alternative defenses. Because law is neither logical nor subject to common sense, this is legal: after all, there is always the possibility of a particular situation under disputed coverage to be neither, it's just that this time it is either-or.
Guess how I know? (No, not myself; my parents.)
This is legal because it is not made illegal. It is the same reason as why the biggest companies pay next to no taxes: they aren't forced to, so they just don't.
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As you get older you discover that most promises made by people who take your money upfront are bullshit.
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As you get older you discover that most promises made by people who take your money upfront are bullshit.
There, I fixed that for you.
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Insurance ONLY ever makes sense for infrequent events that would be hard to defend against.
For instance, your house burns down. You lose $300k. But on 'average' houses do not burn down and so your premium might only be $500 for the year. The insurance company pools together the risk of all of their clients and one might occasionally have to make a $300k claim. The exception is if you live in a wildfire area of course, but that's the 'cost' of living in an area like that, and insurance is not an appropriate product. (Not living there is unfortunately the only way around this!)
Insurance companies absolutely can and do lose money on policies, for instance one car insurer in the UK had to pay out over £50mn for the Selby rail disaster as their client went off the motorway and onto active rail tracks derailing two trains in the process. They were liable for the first £25mn, with the other half covered by their reinsurer. That could easily make the accounts red for that year, it isn't a particularly profitable industry.
Too many people think insurance companies can vest money from nowhere. It is no more a 'scam' than your bank only giving you 0.1% interest rate on your money but you are able to get 8-10% if you chance it right on the stock market ... you are paying someone else to make the effort for you. The money doesn't exist for wide-scale pandemic insurance, because the premiums would cost almost as much as the benefits as the risk is not poolable.
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[...]
Insurance companies absolutely can and do lose money on policies, for instance one car insurer in the UK had to pay out over £50mn for the Selby rail disaster as their client went off the motorway and onto active rail tracks derailing two trains in the process. [...]
In the US, there is an explicit cap in the auto insurance policies that limit this kind of exposure. It can be as low as $100K. I'm surprised that isn't the case in the UK?
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Something like pandemic insurance should be a government thing, and it should just be something that's there by default, for example there needs to be a plan of what to do if there is any kind of disaster where you have to force people to not be able to work or run their business.
I think a good start is to simply write off costs of living for that period. If you tell people they can't work and they can't get paid, then write off all their costs of living. Property taxes, rent, hydro, gas, insurance etc... everything is just written off. You don't make money but you don't lose money. You may have to cancel things that are not required to live like cable TV or whatever but at least the bigger costs would be covered. This would apply to land lords too, they don't need to pay their taxes or their hydro etc. The burden would fall on municipalities (no tax income) and utility companies, but they have tons of money to ride it out, the people, not so much. Most people live pay cheque to pay cheque due to costs of living always going up. The government could then have a long term plan to pay back those companies over a longer period with a fund that would have been already setup for that. Basically it needs to be setup in such a way that in the end, nobody loses money and nobody is forced to go bankrupt.
So many for sale and for lease signs downtown where I live. All the businesses that were forced to close at the start still had to pay their extremely high tax rates and utilities etc and a lot of them had to close within a week. In the end, that means more people that need to go on welfare etc long term even once all this is over, so it actually ends up costing the government more.
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In the US, there is an explicit cap in the auto insurance policies that limit this kind of exposure. It can be as low as $100K. I'm surprised that isn't the case in the UK?
No, it isn't the case, and the US is actually fairly uncommon in this respect. The Road Traffic Act which covers mandatory insurance sets no limit on liability for injury or death, and typically no lower than a £20 million limit on property. That is, an insurer can be theoretically liable for any damages without any limits if a car led to the death or injury of hundreds - in the Selby case 10 were killed and 82 were injured, some very seriously.
$100k really isn't that much money - life long disability caused by a serious accident could easily exceed that.
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Yes insurance companies do lose money. In fact many went out of business covering hurricane losses in Florida.
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Insurance companies are evil. Really what it comes down to is a form of gambling. You are gambling that the payout in the event of a catastrophe and the peace of mind you (perhaps falsely) get by being insured is worth what you pay in premiums. The insurance companies are gambling that the amount they pay out in claims will be sufficiently less than what they collect in premiums. If you do use the insurance, it's a lot like a loan to cover an unexpected loss, you end up paying it back and then some eventually. The more clients use the insurance, the more the rates increase.
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Insurance ONLY ever makes sense for infrequent events that would be hard to defend against.
It is actually the literal opposite.
Insurance only makes sense for events that occur fairly frequently across the entire population, making them statistically predictable.
Then, it is not a matter of gambling whether a covered event occurs, but simply balancing the payment pool and coverage. Individual events occur so often that it no longer is cost effective for the insurance company to fight every claim in court.
This works fine as long as the insurance company behaviour is controlled by simple rules. For example, denying coverage because the payment pool is depleted, must not be allowed. If it is allowed, then there is zero business risk for the insurance company.
It is exactly the rare and devastating situations where insurance companies scam their clients, because that's where it makes financial sense. They do not do it because they are evil, they do it because it is allowed and they make money that way.
I repeat. If you want to change this, you do not fight insurance companies. You fight the people, the status quo supporting majority, and convince or force them to change the rules. When those people see the real-world effects, but refuse to change the rules for a more just world, those are the true evil. Not the ones who play by the rules already set; but those who allow injust rules to remain.
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Keep in mind that the premiums paid to insurance insurance companies don't just sit around waiting for things to happen. They get invested and become the source of capital for many industries including new businesses, roads, bridges, airports, etc. So, play the game and invest in insurance companies. Its historically proven to be a safe bet.
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(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/004/447/whatchatalkinabout.jpg)
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Keep in mind that the premiums paid to insurance insurance companies don't just sit around waiting for things to happen. They get invested and become the source of capital for many industries including new businesses, roads, bridges, airports, etc. So, play the game and invest in insurance companies. Its historically proven to be a safe bet.
Isn't that just another way of saying "don't take an insurance, because the insurance company always wins"?
My point still stands.
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I've said for a very long time (like, that I've understood since late childhood give or take) --
There are three perfect businesses:
Taxation
Gambling
Insurance
And in recent years I've come into some doubt regarding the first one...
(Keep in mind the current former-president of the U.S. has even managed to fail at the second one, somehow. But I think that can be excused as a special case, and I digress.)
Tim
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It is actually the literal opposite.
Insurance only makes sense for events that occur fairly frequently across the entire population, making them statistically predictable.
Then, it is not a matter of gambling whether a covered event occurs, but simply balancing the payment pool and coverage. Individual events occur so often that it no longer is cost effective for the insurance company to fight every claim in court.
This works fine as long as the insurance company behaviour is controlled by simple rules. For example, denying coverage because the payment pool is depleted, must not be allowed. If it is allowed, then there is zero business risk for the insurance company.
Well, you're seeing it from the view point of the insurer, but it's roughly the same.
As a homeowner, you don't expect your home to burn down, but if it did, it would be financially devastating. So you pay a small amount of money to what is essentially a fund, and in the vast majority of cases you never see any of that money back, but you accept that. No one person could ever 'save' for a fire in such a way (you can't put $500 into your bank account annually in case a fire happens because the fund would never get big enough.)
The insurance company knows on average a home goes X years between a devastating fire and so they can charge you $Y for a house with a rebuild cost of $Z. And sure they profit from that, although most of their profit comes from investing your premiums into index trackers and the like. The average car insurer in the UK loses money on the premium (they pay out more on average), but claws it back on the investment.
Is insurance a scam? It depends on how you look at it. Things like flood insurance, even then, aren't necessarily a scam because reinsurance covers the possibility of insurers having to pay claims for a large area.
But for predictable, low cost events, it is. For instance, mobile phone theft. It sucks, but most people can afford to replace their phone, but you can pay hundreds a year for an insurer to cover you anyway. Car warranties. Even a £1k bill sucks but, most people could probably afford that if they can also afford to drive. Those types of insurances are 'scams' because the cost of the policy is relatively high and the payout ratio is also quite high - they are just things you should budget for.
And pandemic insurance just can't exist, just as nuclear war insurance can't exist - the payouts required ($25k per business per month for example?) just are not feasible for even the largest reinsurer.
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It is actually the literal opposite.
Insurance only makes sense for events that occur fairly frequently across the entire population, making them statistically predictable.
Then, it is not a matter of gambling whether a covered event occurs, but simply balancing the payment pool and coverage. Individual events occur so often that it no longer is cost effective for the insurance company to fight every claim in court.
This works fine as long as the insurance company behaviour is controlled by simple rules. For example, denying coverage because the payment pool is depleted, must not be allowed. If it is allowed, then there is zero business risk for the insurance company.
Well, you're seeing it from the view point of the insurer, but it's roughly the same.
I think I understand how you see insurance, and that you don't think we really disagree (and that we're just describing the same thing from opposite viewpoints), but I believe you are missing a crucial point.
Getting an insurance makes sense when the event you insure against would be personally devastating, but across the population is not rare. Housefires, car accidents, such.
Neither Louis or I claimed those are scams. We are specifically talking about business insurance, and insurances sold against pandemics, flooding, natural catastrophes, and other such globally rare event, being scams.
But:
And pandemic insurance just can't exist, just as nuclear war insurance can't exist - the payouts required ($25k per business per month for example?) just are not feasible for even the largest reinsurer.
Yet, the insurance companies still sell these. The scam is that they have zero intention of ever being able to fulfill their end of the contract.
Similarly, business insurances are often scams, because the insurance company has zero intention of paying out when the clauses are actually fulfilled, and instead weigh the payment pool against court costs and possible losses there. The payment pool is their profit, and their court costs and losses at court are the cost of doing this scam business. Similarly for every smaller insurance company, when the payout limit is high: Nobody ever gets the high payment without a court case, and that is the scam. The insurance taker is never told that they will be expected to fight the insurance company in court, usually already in a catastrophic financial situation because of whatever the insurance was supposed to cover.
That is the scam. At the face of it, the contract does not match the insurance company intent, and is therefore fraudulent. It is only allowed, because people like you defend them.
Yes, Tom66. I am calling you the true evil here. Perhaps you should consider the real-world effects of your stance. Just because you know that you cannot expect the contract to be fulfilled at its face value (and that in any case where lots of money would flow the other way, a court case is to be expected), does not make it not-a-scam.
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Yet, the insurance companies still sell these. The scam is that they have zero intention of ever being able to fulfill their end of the contract.
Similarly, business insurances are often scams, because the insurance company has zero intention of paying out when the clauses are actually fulfilled, and instead weigh the payment pool against court costs and possible losses there. The payment pool is their profit, and their court costs and losses at court are the cost of doing this scam business. Similarly for every smaller insurance company, when the payout limit is high: Nobody ever gets the high payment without a court case, and that is the scam. The insurance taker is never told that they will be expected to fight the insurance company in court, usually already in a catastrophic financial situation because of whatever the insurance was supposed to cover.
That is the scam. At the face of it, the contract does not match the insurance company intent, and is therefore fraudulent. It is only allowed, because people like you defend them.
Yes, Tom66. I am calling you the true evil here. Perhaps you should consider the real-world effects of your stance. Just because you know that you cannot expect the contract to be fulfilled at its face value (and that in any case where lots of money would flow the other way, a court case is to be expected), does not make it not-a-scam.
When did I defend such things as pandemic insurance? I literally stated that they are not possible to fulfill. You would have to limit the scope to what is covered to the point of being useless.
Regular insurances, like car, house, etc insurance make sense. It does not make sense to buy house insurance for the risk of you spilling red wine on carpets. Insurers sell these to foolish people, but that is capitalism, and they will pay out for the small number of claims that are made, so if people want to waste their money on that kind of shit, let them.
As I stated insurance is only for risks that are hard to defend against, that can be pooled in risk. Pandemics don't count. And you WILL see exclusions from things like pandemics in insurance policies, just like you will often see riot or civil commotion excluded. READ THE DAMN CONTRACT!!! Business insurance is for, say, a burst pipe floods the store and all the merchandise is destroyed. It is for individual risks that are hard to defend against. The US Government indemnifies rocket launches for risks above $100 million because no reinsurer would take possibly incredible loss as a risk worth taking (Falcon Heavy coming down over Orlando? That cannot be insured against.) Perhaps if the USA had a functional government, the pandemic response (both economic, social and healthcare) would have been better - but they did not.
You wouldn't criticise someone for buying a VW Polo, when they had 7 kids. They bought the wrong product for the wrong job.
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The situation at the international level with coronavirus is pretty interesting. This isn't about insurance, it seems, (in this case international treaties and the investor-state dispute procedures often act like insurance, in indemnifying companies against actions by "States") as much as about who is responsible for a risk which basically all humanity shares.
It seems to me that corporations should share that risk with countries, but they don't always see it that way. There is definitely an obligation to minimize risk. But ...
"A successful claim of force majeure must fulfill 5 conditions: (i) there must be an unforeseen event or an irresistible force (the ‘triggering event’); (ii) the event or force must be beyond the control of the State; (iii) the event must make it ‘materially’ impossible to perform an obligation; (iv) the State must not have contributed to the situation; and (v) the State must not have assumed the risk of the situation occurring. Each of these will be assessed in turn, except for (v) which is likely to depend on the specific language of particular treaty commitments."
https://www.ejiltalk.org/covid-19-and-defences-in-the-law-of-state-responsibility-part-i/ (https://www.ejiltalk.org/covid-19-and-defences-in-the-law-of-state-responsibility-part-i/)
https://www.ejiltalk.org/covid-19-and-defences-in-the-law-of-state-responsibility-part-ii/ (https://www.ejiltalk.org/covid-19-and-defences-in-the-law-of-state-responsibility-part-ii/)
http://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2020/03/30/covid-19-and-investment-treaty-claims/ (http://arbitrationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2020/03/30/covid-19-and-investment-treaty-claims/)
Does anybody here have any experience as a manufacturer with issues like "force majure" etc.?
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The US Government indemnifies rocket launches for risks above $100 million because no reinsurer would take possibly incredible loss as a risk worth taking (Falcon Heavy coming down over Orlando? That cannot be insured against.)
It is insurable and reinsurance is available into the $100 billion range--for a price that nobody wants to pay up front. That indemnification is really just a subsidy to lower the cost of rocket launches. The alternative would be to let the launches go uninsured above the limit of a policy that the company was willing to pay for--and that limit is typically determined by the assets of the company, not the potential damage they might do.
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When did I defend such things as pandemic insurance? I literally stated that they are not possible to fulfill.
Perhaps I read your text wrong, then; I understood that you meant that because they are impossible, nobody should be stupid enough to fall for them.
It is that stance that is the root of this evil, this scam scheme. If that is not your stance, then obviously I mischaracterized you, and sincirely apologise for that.
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions." expresses pretty well my point. Not actively helping stop scammers is the reason why scammers can scam. It is not the scammers themselves that are evil; they are just opportunists – so perhaps immoral, obviously untrustworthy, and so on – but no evil. Evil is to see the damage, and to choose to do nothing, to choose to accept it by doing nothing.
(The reason I am sometimes so offensive, is because so much of the evil in the world I have encountered, exists only because statists are unwilling to help stop it. Because of that, I want to, uh, poke?, those statists, to make them acknowledge the effect of that stance. That stance, the enablers, are the real evil in this world, in my opinion.)
Regular insurances, like car, house, etc insurance make sense. It does not make sense to buy house insurance for the risk of you spilling red wine on carpets. Insurers sell these to foolish people, but that is capitalism, and they will pay out for the small number of claims that are made, so if people want to waste their money on that kind of shit, let them.
As long as the plain reading of the contract matches what (statistically, across all clients making that contract with the company) happens in real life, I have no objections. It's not even capitalism, it is plain healthy competition on a level marketplace.
But that's not what we are talking about here.
We are talking about insurance companies banking on fighting the claims in court, because there is no small claims court or class action suits. It is no longer a matter of balancing the pool against claims; it is when the companies deliberately bank on fighting every substantial claim, regardless of what the plain reading of the contract says. And also when a company sells insurance it cannot and will not cover in any situation.
As I stated insurance is only for risks that are hard to defend against, that can be pooled in risk. Pandemics don't count. And you WILL see exclusions from things like pandemics in insurance policies, just like you will often see riot or civil commotion excluded. READ THE DAMN CONTRACT!!!
You didn't watch the video, did you?
You wouldn't criticise someone for buying a VW Polo, when they had 7 kids. They bought the wrong product for the wrong job.
Right, I would not. But say you went to a car rental, told them you have seven kids and a wife in tow, and you need a car that can carry all of you. The agency shows you the paperwork that it is indeed registered to legally carry nine people plus luggage, and you sign the contract. If they then roll a VW Polo to the door, it is a scam.
That's what we are talking about here.
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A coronavirus epidemic was not at all unexpected.
There are two links in the first of the articles I linked earlier.
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A coronavirus epidemic was not at all unexpected.
https://youtu.be/NbbRfyEk_TQ?t=177
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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? :)
By the way, Russia now has very good conditions for small businesses - you can use a simplified one. The tax system and I use it. This is a payment of 6% of the income (you can 15% of the profit) and no accounting. It is only necessary to send a declaration once a year (the bank does it for me for free), pay tax and social insurance each quarter. Social insurance is deducted from the tax. :)
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If only there was a way to identify those who break the COVID safety rules (and thereby keep it going), then charge them a lot more for health insurance and/or deprioritize them for care. Problem is, there's no good way to do that. But then I had an idea: what if there were health insurance plans with a much higher deductible for COVID-related hospitalizations than for other health problems, in exchange for lower premiums? (Exception: if COVID was caught going to the hospital to care for some other health problem that cannot be delayed.) Such plans would push people to be more careful about not catching COVID.
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[...] Maybe the market economy is not so good against the background of socialism? :) [...]
That is a very old question, of course. My feeling is that each of the two systems is better at some things than the other. So I favour a mixed system... where the state takes care of defense, education, healthcare, pensions (if the private sector is involved, the state should be the customer)... and leave the private sector to do as much "non critical stuff" as possible.
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[...] Maybe the market economy is not so good against the background of socialism? :) [...]
That is a very old question, of course. My feeling is that each of the two systems is better at some things than the other. So I favour a mixed system... where the state takes care of defense, education, healthcare, pensions (if the private sector is involved, the state should be the customer)... and leave the private sector to do as much "non critical stuff" as possible.
so what most of the world is doing?
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The % balance is different - e.g. compare USA and China, or even the UK and Denmark?
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If only there was a way to identify those who break the COVID safety rules (and thereby keep it going), then charge them a lot more for health insurance and/or deprioritize them for care. Problem is, there's no good way to do that. But then I had an idea: what if there were health insurance plans with a much higher deductible for COVID-related hospitalizations than for other health problems, in exchange for lower premiums? (Exception: if COVID was caught going to the hospital to care for some other health problem that cannot be delayed.) Such plans would push people to be more careful about not catching COVID.
What about people who are naturally more exposed to COVID risk. Key workers like supermarket employees, restaurant waiters, parcel delivery drivers, etc. Do they get to pay more too?
There isn't a 'market based solution' to a problem like this.
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Insurance companies seem to hate small business.
Sure they do. With good reason. Something like 80% of small businesses dont survive for 5 years.
Who would be crazy to play those odds?
Most of these small business owners have a plan like this:
"I like baking cookies, and people like it, so I make a bakery, and people will buy it for like 5 dollars."
"Do you know accounting? HR? Do you know the legal requirements? Have you ever worked overtime on your weekend?"
"No, but I like cookies"
Honestly, Luis is not different. He is constantly ranting about topics, which he has not a single clue how they work. He spent a better half of last year ranting about NY rental market. Until someone explained to him how financing and contracts work. And then he went on a rant: OMG, that's crazy. This is like 95% of his content now. Not worth the time to watch IMHO.
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What about people who are naturally more exposed to COVID risk. Key workers like supermarket employees, restaurant waiters, parcel delivery drivers, etc. Do they get to pay more too?
There isn't a 'market based solution' to a problem like this.
Workers exposed to greater risk at the workplace with no reasonable way to lower the risk any further than it currently is could get lesser deductible increases.
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Insurance companies seem to hate small business.
Sure they do. With good reason. Something like 80% of small businesses dont survive for 5 years.
Who would be crazy to play those odds?
why would an insurance company care if a small business only survives 5 years?, as long as they
pay while alive
Most of these small business owners have a plan like this:
"I like baking cookies, and people like it, so I make a bakery, and people will buy it for like 5 dollars."
"Do you know accounting? HR? Do you know the legal requirements? Have you ever worked overtime on your weekend?"
"No, but I like cookies"
Honestly, Luis is not different. He is constantly ranting about topics, which he has not a single clue how they work. He spent a better half of last year ranting about NY rental market. Until someone explained to him how financing and contracts work. And then he went on a rant: OMG, that's crazy. This is like 95% of his content now. Not worth the time to watch IMHO.
that there's an explanation why it is crazy doesn't make it any less crazy
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What about people who are naturally more exposed to COVID risk. Key workers like supermarket employees, restaurant waiters, parcel delivery drivers, etc. Do they get to pay more too?
There isn't a 'market based solution' to a problem like this.
Workers exposed to greater risk at the workplace with no reasonable way to lower the risk any further than it currently is could get lesser deductible increases.
excellent way to pointlessly waste a few billions on bureaucracy and get nothing in return
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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.
What about people who are naturally more exposed to COVID risk. Key workers like supermarket employees, restaurant waiters, parcel delivery drivers, etc. Do they get to pay more too?
There isn't a 'market based solution' to a problem like this.
Workers exposed to greater risk at the workplace with no reasonable way to lower the risk any further than it currently is could get lesser deductible increases.
excellent way to pointlessly waste a few billions on bureaucracy and get nothing in return
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What about people who are naturally more exposed to COVID risk. Key workers like supermarket employees, restaurant waiters, parcel delivery drivers, etc. Do they get to pay more too?
There isn't a 'market based solution' to a problem like this.
Yes, they likely soon will, a lot. That's how insurance works. Here in the US we've had a 10 year reprieve likely because of the 2010 financial crisis. But its ending now. In the UK a similar dynamic will likely require the NHS be shrunk a lot. In both countries people who can afford to buy insurance will have to and gradually the thresholds and the penalties for lying to get insurance you're not entitled to will also increase. People who were not entitled to coverage may have their coverage ended and payments made on their behalf retroactively clawed back to the beginning of the policy and will be rebilled at the uninsured rate. Which is often many times higher, especially in California. See a series by Lisa Girion in the LA Times during the mid to late 2000s, for some horrifying stories. Its called "rescission" or "post claim underwriting" - These are people who are dying of terminal illnesses, usually, who they decide to go after.
Of course you will never read anything about that. Its totally twisted how they determine whats done, governments can do a lot less than people think, here in the US we made all sorts of commitments meaning that the WTO is actually who is in charge now.
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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.
around here health insurance is paid via tax so the wealthy actually pays more ...
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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.
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.
around here health insurance is paid via tax so the wealthy actually pays more ...
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.
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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? :)
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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...
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My uncle told me that the main function of insurance was social and it was to keep people participating in the economy without fear.