I Hate Insurance

Somewhere along the way I think we got something wrong with insurance. I hate insurance. I hate car insurance, I hate health insurance, I hate liability insurance, if I though about it I'm sure I would hate home owner's insurance. If I were in charge this insurance thing would work differently.

Have you ever been working on something and had someone tell you that you wouldn't be doing what you thought you would because the insurance wouldn't cover it? What is that about? And who are they to be making that decision? I have a better one. How about finding out you wouldn't be doing something even though your insurance will cover it because someone else's insurance won't cover it and you want to be sure in the event of an emergency their insurance will pay and not yours.

The whole business is built on a lie - save for a rainy day, and pool your savings with others. Seems simple enough. I pay them so that they have my money when something goes drastically wrong for me. They get to hold my money while I don't need it and invest it to make more money - plus they have a zillion people do this at once because something awful can't happen to everyone at once so when we need the money it will be there. It's a nice idea. It's a good idea. It should help the world go more smoothly.

But.

But it should stifle creativity, or tell people they can't do things.

But if a government requires it they damn well ought to provide it.

But they shouldn't turn into complete crapweasels when it is time to pay.

There's too much money being made, too much fine print being used, too much obfuscation through process, too much plain ill will. Insurance came about as a way to help people, why on Earth is it such an unhelpful industry?

I think maybe we're to the point in history where we need an insurance revolution. Why do we need insurance companies, why can't we all be self insured? Why can't all insurance efforts be required to be not-for-profit ventures? Doesn't it seem reasonable in this day and age that all insurance should be some kind of co-op?

You get together a group of people, they each pay in a given amount of money for the year. If any of them have problems they get a payout from the plan. At the end of the year, a charge gets assessed against the fund to pay for the next years expenses... and any surplus gets paid back to the co-op members.

If the profit motive were removed, if there was really no interest for the people running the fund to have money left at the end of the year because it was going to be rebated to the co-op members anyway don't you think the companies would be less likely to make it so hard to get a pay out? Why should my not getting sick be a financial gain to some stock holder in an insurance company? If I pay in and I don't get sick and there's a surplus of funds I think maybe I should get that money back.

I'd even be cool with only getting maybe 50% back if the other 50% were paid into an endowment account to offset future expenses. Under that scenario there would likely be a time that if you were a member long enough you could probably stop paying in.

So yes, this is probably an invitation for graft; and yes, there would likely be a fair amount of discrimination among co-op membership; and yes there would have to be something for people that couldn't find a co-op. But aren't all those things true now anyway? Its just that in the existing system the graft goes both ways. In a strange light, you can almost feel like the person robbing the company is a hero because you are pretty damn sure the company spends most of their time robbing everyone else.

Why is it that when we talk about social problems people always want to depend on "a thousand points of light" but if there's money to be made then it has to be left to business and the free market? Even if it were run exactly as it is right now, I would rather pay my premium to a civic organization, a club, a religious body, or even a government entity than to a private company. At least in all of the former cases whatever profit is realized goes at least in some small part to me. In the case of the latter I am helping to buy some douchebag a Porsche.

Why on Earth would I want to do that?