[Lounsbury]

Originally Posted by Tuckerfan

Executives tend to have access to better plans and services than do ordinary folks (You think Steve Ballmer has to talk to the same insurance call center drone as the low-level MS employees do? Nope.), and often times their employers will pick up the full cost of the coverage. They don't even have to worry about a co-pay. High value executives might also have coverage mandated by the company's insurer. This is to protect their investment in the company. I can remember news accounts in the '80s about executives complaining because the insurance company was prohibiting them from doing "risky" things, like flying in small planes (since they're more likely to crash than commercial planes).

Simply put, wealthy people don't have the same experiences with insurance companies that poor folks do, because the insurance companies are more concerned about keeping the wealthy person's business than the poor person's.

I rather doubt there is anything behind this comment than bald assumptions and ideology based assertion (mixed in with misunderstood fact, such as corporate Key Man insurance cited, in fact to the benefit of the company). While certainly with more money one can buy more extensive coverage as the higher pricing means less to you on a per capita basis (although more extensive coverage generally escalates rapidly in price to match the escalation in risk exposure(*)), this says exactly nothing about the utility of insurance and risk mitigation.

Empty assertion really tells us nothing about the subject of the utility of insurance (other than highlighting the class envy in certain parts).

As point of fact, it is impossible to build a scale insurance business on "the 1%" to use the favoured phrase of the Left in the USA. Depending on the profile, in fact the insurance industry does need the non rich.

Regardless, the economic data show a fundamental correlation between insurance market development - that is mass insurance access, and improved economic growth. (one can simply search google scholar for the economic literature impact, insurance, economic growth, developing countries to see a selection of the literature).

Were insurance in fact a scam and a bad deal for people, it is rather unlikely this correlation would emerge again and again across geographies of different culture, economic structure and maturity. Rather than relying on simpleminded anecdote and bald assertion, data tells us reality.

Originally Posted by mswas

Hedging risk isn't a scam. Private health insurance in America? It's a scam.

Perhaps, although I rather find the idea that in fact private health insurance in America is a "scam" in the ordinary English meaning of the word, to be risible.

Perhaps what is really meant behind the empty headed Left maundering is that private insurance as a national policy solution for mass health insurance coverage is not an optimal choice.

That is probably true, although fundamentally a different proposition.

It is telling that most of the Left bleating here about insurance revolves around health insurance (excepting the laughably innumerate idiocy about self-insuring a house, evidently made by a poster incapable of even simple maths). US insurance industry would seem well served to pivot to supporting national basic care and retreating to upper income supplementary coverage, a less politically fraught and likely more profitable segment in the long run.