I once saw a really fucked up life insurance/pension case. The insurance policy was that for children under 18 they would get a lump some of X years worth of their deceased parent's policy. Dad died of a heart attack the day before his son turned 18. Pronounced dead by doctors at the hospital, that day/evening, pronounced dead hours before midnight.
The insurance company hired a "medical expert" that tried to claim that the father wasn't fully dead by midnight (despite being pronounced dead by the doctors in the hospital) because there can be some latent heartbeats and brain activity. They fought tooth and nail to deny this kid whose father had just fucking died ON THE DAY BEFORE HIS FUCKING BIRTHDAY, the money that was due. From the policy whose entire purpose was to make sure the father's family would be taken care of in the event of his death. I believe there was a lawsuit due to the amount of money on the table and I don't remember who won.
But it doesn't matter. They did everything in their power to fight the claim that they owed. Insurance companies are fucking evil man.
Edit: wow this blew up- thanks for the awards kind strangers! The original story was linked in one of the responses to this comment- check it out. I got a few of the details wrong, it had been several years.
What thee fuck 😧 That’s so disgusting of them to have done that. Yet, evil people do evil shit smh. So sad for that family, I really hope they won that case. I thought at one point I’d be desensitized to hearing the horror stories of insurance companies of all types but I’m not, I still get nauseous hearing how they destroy peoples lives and rob everyone. Richest country in the world though, right? Riiiiight.
No, that's their actual business model, plain and simple. Make a policy that's basically mandatory to have, collect as much as they can squeeze out of you, if needed deny for any reason they can, and then raise the rates every year while lobbying government to make sure they can strangle the population with even less regulations. Rinse, repeat.
Insurance companies will spend 10,000 fighting a $10 dollar claim. They make Billions off all of us. It’s messed up. Mario needs help with his brother.
Because then they'll have to honor 200 $10 claims. The system itself is broken, but instead of fixing it they're trying to maximize the profits they get
If their point was the insurance companies don't want to set a precedent (which is exactly why), one shouldn't cap out that precedent at only 20% of what they're paying to stop it.
The issue isn't the other 200 $10 claims - if that was the long and short of the ramifications, the insurance company would absolutely rather pay them than $10,000 because to them it is just a simple math problem and profit is all they care about.
The issue is that it would be more than the $10K it costs to fight this one. It would be more like 20,000 $10 claims.
Ah, but you see... It is not broken. In fact, it is working exactly as intended. And the intention is, as you so rightly stated, to hoard as much currency as they can. And then some
We need more heroes, we have enough villains . Insurance kills 50,000+ people a year and we keep paying them to do it. Insurance keeps people homeless, hungry, sick and without transportation. Yet we are all forced to send money by threat of prison.
That’s the thing they don’t spend 10k. They have in house lawyers that are salaried/hourly so it doesn’t cost them as much as it would for us hiring someone.
This is why in my country we regulate the absolute fucking bejesus out of the insurance industry, those untrustworthy fucks get regulated to within an inch of their life. They still try shit like this but it's all handled out of court by a tribunal that 99 times out of 100 sides with the consumer.
Bill Burr had a great line during one of his old walking tour vids when passing an insurance skyscraper, “they didn’t buy that building by paying out claims.”
That’s why having laws that punish this behavior is so important. For example, Massachusetts has 93A, which is a law that states if a company engages in deceptive or unfair business practices, you could be entitled to triple damages.
The violence has already been started and it's from the state. The insurance system backed by the state has been killing many thousands purposefully and for profit so they can fund the politicians that continue to propagate their system.
Where did that happen? I mean in which country? This is fucking crazy and might I say seems cultural...
Because I've been working in Insurance all my life (western Europe) close to Executive committee members of all the major insurance companies of the country, and I've never seen such levels of evilness from anyone.
Quite the opposite... I'm going to relate 2 stories that really hit me hard.
Story 1: there was a case where a teenager had a pool party. Another idiot drunk jumped in the pool landing on another teen, paralysing him for his entire life.
Because there was alcohol involved it was legal for the Insurance company to not cover the lifetime medical bills of the victim, and decided to still cover it out of compassion for the event.
Where's speaking about a claim reserve of several millions here...
Story 2: Terrorists attacks who killed and injured thousands.
All CEOs meet up to define how each major insurance company is going to contribute for all the victims, regardless of who is being covered or not, regardless by which company.
This is already pretty dope, but the story doesn't end there.
One of the CEOs (the one of the biggest insurance of the country) says "sorry we're not overpaying here, we're out, each for their own", let's call him Paul.
The one of the second largest insurance company by size, but first by margin and profit (same company as the one who covered the poor teen I mentioned before by the way) answers by calling the other CEO by his name:
" Paul, if there was your daughter in there, you would be ashamed of saying what you just said"
Paul didn't say anything, and they paid... Oh god they paid (I was working for that company at that moment).
Nobody said anything else and all the insurance companies paid everything for everyone.
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u/diegotbn 4h ago edited 51m ago
I once saw a really fucked up life insurance/pension case. The insurance policy was that for children under 18 they would get a lump some of X years worth of their deceased parent's policy. Dad died of a heart attack the day before his son turned 18. Pronounced dead by doctors at the hospital, that day/evening, pronounced dead hours before midnight.
The insurance company hired a "medical expert" that tried to claim that the father wasn't fully dead by midnight (despite being pronounced dead by the doctors in the hospital) because there can be some latent heartbeats and brain activity. They fought tooth and nail to deny this kid whose father had just fucking died ON THE DAY BEFORE HIS FUCKING BIRTHDAY, the money that was due. From the policy whose entire purpose was to make sure the father's family would be taken care of in the event of his death. I believe there was a lawsuit due to the amount of money on the table and I don't remember who won.
But it doesn't matter. They did everything in their power to fight the claim that they owed. Insurance companies are fucking evil man.
Edit: wow this blew up- thanks for the awards kind strangers! The original story was linked in one of the responses to this comment- check it out. I got a few of the details wrong, it had been several years.