Mutually Insured Insanity

Long ago, insurance was predominantly viewed as being a stop gap measure that was designed to cover you financially should disaster strike you.

As with most things back in the way back when, taking out insurance on one’s property was a luxury that only the rich could afford.

As such it both gave them a weapon to use against the honest and the poor whilst at the same time providing many with the means that would eventually make them targets.

But what about today?

Supposedly insurance is now something that everyone who owns anything should be able to afford.

That’s what we’re told right?

After all, what’s the point of owning a nice car, a nice home or even a nice laptop if you can’t afford to insure it against its potential loss?

I mean really, what on earth would you do if your car was stolen or trashed and it wasn’t insured?

Or worse still, what would you do if a hurricane or a raging flood engulfed your home and you weren’t insured?

Chances are you’d probably be in a right mess, as would we all, if such things were to happen to us.

Yet the truth is, that the chances of any of those things actually happening to us in our lifetimes, are fairly small.

That is unless of course you’ve chosen to buy, build or rent a house in an area that’s known to be prone to such disastrous occurrences.

In which case taking out insurance to cover such risky behavior on your part would seem to be the only fair and reasonable thing to do.

Or so we are told.

But what if it’s not the only fair and reasonable thing to do?

What if the actually fair and reasonable thing to do would be to choose not to take such risks by choosing not to build, buy or rent in areas that are prone to natural disasters?

Wouldn’t that make more sense?

So what if we only believe that such risks are reasonable simply because it’s what insurance companies, the people who make money out of our risk taking behaviors, want us to accept and believe in order to guarantee that we’ll keep doing it?

The insurance industry, over the last 4 decades, has become a n auto exacerbating entity in its own right.

As such, it’s key area of interest lies solely in perpetuating its own areas of growth and profits.

Insurance companies are not genuinely interested in making sure that we as individuals are covered against any and all future financial losses.

If they were, well then, we may as well call them charities.

Because that’s basically what they’d have to be if their main area of interest lay in preventing us from becoming destitute due to misfortune or unforseen circumstances, whilst not turning a healthy profit by doing so.

But they’re not charities.

They’re businesses.

And like all businesses they’re sole aim is to make as much profit as they possibly can out of their customers.

They do this by engendering the sense of fear within us that something unforseen might happen to us.

That someone might steal our car, break into our homes, or that we ourselves may be struck by lightning, another person’s car, a truck, a bus or just pure bad luck.

Via this fear mongering they encourage us to insure more and more items with them for more and more money.

And as we do so our premiums go up and up and up, right alongside our access fees.

But does anyone ever stop to ask whether or not any of this is even feasible, let alone sensible?

Does anyone ever stop to consider the fact that, barring natural disasters, crimes are committed by other real life people and that for many criminals, the fact that the owners of whatever item is stolen or damaged is probably insured, provides the very rational for targeting those people or items in the first place?

From small crimes like shop lifting:

                “Hey the stores are insured so it’s no skin off their nose if a few items go missing here and there.”

To larger crimes like robbing banks:

                “The money’s insured so what does it matter. It’s not like they’re actually going to lose anything.”

Or far more heinous crimes like kidnapping and ransom:

                “They’re rich. They’re insurance company will payout. ”

All provide classic examples of the way in which our societies thinking processes have been altered by the mere idea, let alone the actualization, of insurance.

So pervasive has the role of insurance become within our society that even genuine accidents, such as small fender benders, are now being treated with the gravity of a life and death situation, in which the person with the biggest insurance company wins.

No longer is it even an option for the parties involved in ‘fender benders’ to even try to talk directly to each other to sort out the quickest and most cost effective way for one to make reparations to the other.

Instead such things now involve the swapping of insurance company details and any notion that the real life people involved might actually be able to resolve such accidents themselves faster, cheaper and easier, without ever getting insurance companies involved seems to have gone completely out the window.

And heaven help you if you are an uninsured driver who’s involved in a ‘fender bender’ as the other person’s insurance company will see to it that you are taken to the cleaners and charged for every little thing they can possibly think to charge you for, including encouraging their client to use a hire car whilst awaiting repairs, simply for the sake of making their client believe they are getting their money’s worth from their insurer, when no such undue expense is either warranted or required.

Yet the insurance company isn’t the one paying the bill for all of these things.

The other driver is.

All the insurance company does in such situations is simply add on the cost of their substantial fees for doing nothing more than sending the other driver the bill.

Seriously, just think about it.

The insured driver is the person who drives the car to the repair shop of their choice.

They pick out their choice of hire car.

They return their hire car and collect their repaired car.

The insurance company quite literally does nothing at all within this entire process other than send out a bill.

It pays out no money what so ever to its client, yet retains the premiums paid, plus the access fee, plus then maintains the right to charge their client a higher premium simply because they’ve made a claim for which the insurance company paid no money out on.

So the insurance company makes a tidy profit for doing nothing much at all.

Just think that over for a few seconds and you may be able to see how honest people, who do take responsibility for their actions in such situations, are fundamentally being double billed for their honesty by an insurance company that’s done nothing but encourage their client to get the most expensive repair job possible and waste money on an unnecessary hire car in the process.

It’s a wonder anyone ever dares own an uninsured vehicle and I’m sure, given enough time, the act of doing so will eventually become illegal.

The point of all this is to highlight the ways in which insurance companies are changing the face of our society.

Now, not only do we live in a world in which we are constantly being told that we should strive to own a nice car, a nice home and have nice possessions, but that once we achieve these things we should also live in the perpetual fear of someone taking these nice things away from us.

Hence we should pay continuously to hedge our bets against such things happening to us, despite the fact that the very people who are making life so expensive and unpredictable for us are the same ones who are insuring that life is so.

How does this even make sense to anyone?

What’s the point of striving for the biggest and the best if all its doing is leading us to a place of fear and loathing once we achieve our goals?

Wouldn’t it have made more sense for us to have been directed instead toward striving to become a generation of decent people living in a world surrounded by other decent people?

Yet, all the insurance industry has done is made it possible for us to continuously believe the worst of other people.

To fear them to such a point that we feel that we have to pay money to cover the many potential “what if” scenarios that they throw at us daily.

To me, this is the very definition of mutually insured insanity and I for one am tired of being told that I don’t live in a world where I can trust others to do the right thing.

Thanks to insurance companies, we’ll never really know if people are capable of doing the right thing anymore.

Because their very existence both underpins and perpetuates the idea that people are no longer capable of doing the right thing.

In fact, according to them, people have become so incapable of doing the right thing that we are now required to pay money, year after year, to faceless corporations who take that money knowing full well that the chances of anything really catastrophic happening to us is slim to none.

We can’t insure ourselves against life.

All though I’m sure that at some point in time we’ll be encouraged to try doing just that.

After all, they’ve already got death covered now haven’t they?