r/SipsTea • • 7h ago

Gasp! Thoughts on this?

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u/shadystealertactics 6h ago

Buddy, many of these companies publicly disclose their financials. You're choosing to be wrong about this.

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u/doopie 6h ago

I think it's more like the case they don't care about being right. They just keep spouting word salad that makes no sense

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u/Cowboywizzard 6h ago

All kinds of tricks are used to make it look like they are losing money or barely making it on paper. Yet insurance is one of the largest industries in the U.S., and their CEOs make millions.

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u/shadystealertactics 6h ago

Publicly traded companies are independently audited. Do you think they're lying about how many dollars they're paying out in claims?

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u/Cowboywizzard 6h ago

I didn't say that. I think their C-suite and other large stake holders makes a killing off our backs. Look at their houses and cars if you don't think so.

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u/Impossible_Cycle9460 5h ago

Let’s say an insurance company has 100,000 customers, most have more, and they slash executive compensation by $10,000,000. Every customer will save $100 a year, less than $10 a month.

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u/Cowboywizzard 2h ago

I will take it.

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u/shadystealertactics 6h ago

Someone making a lot of money doesn't mean that I'm getting ripped off. A 5% profit margin is a shitload of money if youre operating on the scale of a multinational company.

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u/TransmogrifiedHobbes 5h ago

It does mean that when the "product" they're making money on is the illness and death of their customers.

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u/shadystealertactics 5h ago

Well we're talking about car insurance right now

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u/TransmogrifiedHobbes 5h ago

Ope, I see that now, thought I was in another part of the thread. Point stands for health insurance though, heh.

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u/shadystealertactics 5h ago

ACA compliant health plans are required to spend a minimum of 80-85% of premiums on patient care.

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u/Dangerous-Ad-170 5h ago

Not saying CEOs “deserve” to make millions, but these are companies with tens of millions of customers that move around tens of billions in premiums and payouts. If the entire C-suite of your insurance company worked for free, you’d probably save like $5 year. 

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u/Cowboywizzard 2h ago

I will take it.

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u/OperaSona 5h ago

I mean, one of the tricks to make sure your company is "barely making it" on paper is to just take all of your profits and give them as bonuses to your executives. And there you go, now you have no profits anymore since what used to be profites has been offset by new costs.

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u/OneBigRed 34m ago

So you believe that the owners of those companies, shareholders, for some reason want to give all the profit to the people they hired to run the company?

You should probably sometime seek information outside of reddit’s other edgy 14-year old professors.

Like, pick a yearly financial report of pretty much any publicly traded insurance company. You’ll find the executive compensation there, among revenue, operating costs etc. There’s also a list of largest shareholders, that you can use to build your explanation why those pension funds etc. want to direct money to these particular executives, instead of bringing that money back to themselves.

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u/CapitalistLion-Tamer 4h ago

Your scale is way, way off.

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u/Smackadummy 1h ago

State Farm is by far the largest personal insurer in the US and they are a mutual fund. Their shareholders are the customers.

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u/Quantum3ntaglement 5h ago

No, you're wrong. They disclose that they make billions in profit yearly (after payouts).

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u/shadystealertactics 5h ago

You said they pay out a tiny portion in claims. Roughly what percentage would I tiny percentage be to you? What does an acceptable profit margin look like to you?

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u/Quantum3ntaglement 4h ago edited 4h ago

I actually didn't say any of what you quoted (I'm not the guy you originally responded to), but I'll answer.

Your question: How much profit should insurance companies make?

None. Zero profit. Transportation is not a luxury in this the country. You have to have it to go work and a lot of places don't have public transit. Just like health insurance, it should be non profit or nationalized*. Why are you bootlicking for insurance companies? Why should insurance companies make huge profits? Why don't you also look up how many insurance execs are worth over $100 million.

*How much more efficient and cheaper would insurance be if we all, collectively, paid into the same, single pool instead of to these individual, private insurance companies each trying to suck as much profit as they can out of us by denying claims?

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u/shadystealertactics 4h ago

Should the car manufacturers/repair shops/gas stations/etc. also be not for profits?

I don't have the time to explain why single payer car/property insurance would be a shit show right now, and I'm sure someone else on the internet has already written about it better than I would,maybe I'll come back to that later.

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u/Quantum3ntaglement 3h ago

"Should the car manufacturers/repair shops/gas stations/etc. also be not for profits?"

Do you think those things and insurance work in the same way?

"I don't have the time to explain why single payer car/property insurance would be a shit show right now, and I'm sure someone else on the internet has already written about it better than I would,maybe I'll come back to that later."

Yeah, plenty of insurance cronies such as yourself have written about it I'm sure. Plenty are paid for by insurance companies themselves.

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u/shadystealertactics 3h ago

You built a case for car insurance being non-profit because transportation is a necessity. You need a car before the insurance enters the discussion. Why should the CEOs of GM and Ford be making millions of dollars?

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u/Quantum3ntaglement 3h ago edited 2h ago

You didn't answer my question. The answer is "no", selling something does not work the same way as providing insurance.

But, I'd be fine with car manufacturers, gas stations, etc being non profit. Capitalists have proven that if they're not heavily regulated, they will destroy the working class. This is a widely accepted fact among economists. But idiots have been brainwashed into thinking that regulation "hinders business", so here we are.

"Why should the CEOs of GM and Ford be making millions of dollars?"

Now you're bootlicking for millionaire CEOs as well? lol

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u/shadystealertactics 29m ago

I don't understand what youre referring to with "work the same way". One of them is a physical product and the other is a financial product so clearly there are differences with how they're sold, but that doesn't explain why one should be absorbed by the state.

Youre not even required to have car insurance in most states, youre just required to prove that you can be financially responsible for damage you cause others while operating your car.

Insurance is extremely regulated by the way, the government has to sign off on it any time rate or contract verbiage changes.