Comments on: Insurance – Mutual Aid Or Gambling

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 18:46:12 +0000

This was a regional outage affecting everyone in two counties, so it must have been something in a switching center on the I-10 corridor. They have too much fiber in the ground, but have never gotten around to connecting the telephone system into it. Rather strange since fiber was the big selling point for Sprint/Embarq for years.

I’m not back at DSL speeds, but I can at least see some of what’s going on. No multi-media, which I don’t care about, but it makes trying to connect to news sites a pain.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 18:20:13 +0000

At least Blue Cross – Blue Shield has an appropriate acronym.

The great (if rather strange) early 20th-century American composer Charles Ives formed and ran an insurance company. Wikipedia doesn’t talk much about it, but IIRC from earlier reading, Ives was rather proud of the fact, because in those early days, insurance was a progressive innovation. There’s no reason that it couldn’t be, done properly; i.e., done from the notion of shared risk rather than immoderate profits. But it seems we’re going the other direction. Is anybody surprised?

As you note, Bryan, insurance and for-profit private enterprise are a bad fit. I’m all in favor of private enterprise when it improves the lot of our society’s citizens, and there are plenty of cases where it does. But this is emphatically not one of them.

Welcome back to the “tubes,” Bryan. What did you in? The last time I was brought down for a day, it was a backhoe a block away… that workhorse of 20th-century construction can certainly be the bane of 21st-century connectivity. With apologies to Tobias Hume…

The backhoe, the backhoe,
Sing… sweetly for the backhoe!

(The 17th-century original is, of course, “tobacco.”)

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:09:32 +0000

I’m back zipping along at about 28.8K. Any time I expect to have the full ability of dial-up at the price of DSL.

That is what the meeting between Nixon and Kaiser-Permanente was all about – dumping the concept of “mutual.” Many of those listed as “mutual” aren’t really. They are tied to stock companies through creative fictions. Blue Cross-Blue Shield has a lot of these “arrangements.”

There is “business interruption” insurance that covers it, according to the policy, but good luck on getting a claim paid. If having all of your office computers and digital records stolen doesn’t qualify as a “business interruption,” I don’t know what does.

By: andante

andante — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:07:41 +0000

If they don’t sell it yet, they’ll figure out a way. And make it a federal law to have it.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 03:35:28 +0000

i wonder if they sell insurance for that

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 03:09:14 +0000

NOTE: Tues 10:10pm CT, Bryan emailed me about a half hour ago that his connection is almost down. He’s running at about 1200 bps, which renders blogging impossible. He’ll be back when they fix the connection.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:15:19 +0000

mutual of omaha's wild kingdom. how prescient. 2006 fortune 1000 insurance industry profits, as percent of revenues* life and health, mutual [12 companies] ~ 5% life and health, stock [17 companies] ~ 10% property and casualty, mutual [5 companies] ~ 11% property and casualty, stock [33 companies] ~ 13% looks like demutualization pays, provided you're a stockholder. policyholders, ymmv.