On every single professional sports game I’ve ever seen, every single show, every single channel. Isn’t this our fucking money you’re meant to give out should, god forbid, something happen?
Why is it even legal to do this? Blowing this money on CONSTANT, DUMB fucking little fucking cutesy fucking skits, not even trying to fucking pitch anything anymore, just burning money on TV and laughing at us while the fucking lemur does epic bants. it makes me so fucking sick, these people should be chained in the dungeons for the rest of their lives.
It’s illegal to not have car insurance so why the fuck do they think we need to see this constant fucking microwaved vomit fucking garbage every fucking second every fucking show every fucking channel??
thank you
I am in a particularly hateful state about insurance. My brother is an insurance broker in another state. My other brother is a right wing cuck who thinks capitalism makes everything the greatest it could be (trumper too, btw). My wife has worked all her life to pay into all the things and last April she suddenly lost her vision and her job and her shitty doctor didnt know how to treat her vertigo for seven years and fucking told her that only Jesus can fix her and now she’s fucked, broke, and today is asking me if I want a divorce so I wont be responsible for her debts or suicide.
If any if you fucking MAGA shitheads are reading this: you’re goddamn right America is a shitty country and you fucking assholes are the reason why.
If my doctor told me that my situation now is up to god, I’d change doctor immediately and report them to the national doctors association in my country.
Hope you and your wife make the best of it nonetheless. So extreme listening to people who can’t demand or have the right to be treated for their issues!
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This is one of a thousand reasons why the entire insurance industry should be burnt to the ground
Surely they would be insured for that though?
They’d just find a way to make us pay for it.
Unrelated, but I saw an ad for a cremation company on the TV the other day. They said they had a 4.5 rating on trustpilot, and I spent too long wondering who left those reviews…
It should just be public. One big insurance company that covers everyone under one set of rules, with zero ad budget and total transparency to voters. Not a private company that can deny coverage and run off with profits. Not an elective product that only high risk people will get. Not a hassle that you have to sign up for and pay bills on. Just built into our taxes and public institutions. Period.
You spelled “Extortion” wrong.
i hop between geico, progressive, and allstate. after the 6month bait deal ends i just call and move over to the next competitors 6 month sweet deal.
It’s easy to maintain, just 3 tabs on my browser and now you don’t even have to talk to a person.
i learned after graduating in 2006 and walking face first into 2008s bullshit. if they want to hot potato lumps of debt, ill just hot potato competing services.
a petition to ban marketing, advertising, and sale of personal information in general would be a good way to have a chance at shattering big tech and commercial crap all at once, but it’ll never happen 🙁
You do realize this is going to make a lot of “free” services no longer free. Greed follows the hand.
It’s funny how private companies can subsidise free services but somehow “society” would not be able to do it…
It’s not, that’s wby it only occur in USA
Lol #MAGA
At one point around the enaction of Obama-care there was a dude with a combover that came around to our office to tell us that “yes, healthcare costs are high in America, but I’m here to tell you that insurance companies are not the problem.”
So here he is: a guy lying to himself about his hair loss with a full-time job going around to different companies saying how insurance companies are not the problem…surely he couldn’t be lying, a waste, or a lying waste.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between wigs and weasel jobs like salesmen or estate agents.
If you can lie to yourself you can lie to anyone.
One of these at a time, that’s how it all works.
Car insurance ads are bad, but health insurance ads are worse. Every time I see one I wonder whose treatment got denied to pay for it.
Thanks to Obamacare, insurance companies are required to spend a high percentage of their revenue on delivering actual care. There is a limit to what they can spend on everything else. Thanks Obama!
They could still help more people if they weren’t buying billboards advertising something people are required by law to have.
Let’s put aside the many, many problems of insurance companies in reality and talk in terms of two parties acting in good faith for ease of demonstration.
Let’s take random person Alice who has insured her wrench set at Insurance Company X. Her wrench set is very important to her job and she only believes in high quality tools, so it is quite expensive. So expensive, that if something were to happen to it, she might not be able to replace it right away. Instead, she pays Company X for an insurance policy. Alice can afford to pay a little bit every month and so this is a good set up.
Uh oh, an impromptu stomp band raided Alice’s store and appropriated her wrenches as drumsticks. They’re ruined! Luckily, Alice is insured and Insurance Company X pays her for replacement wrenches.
Unfortunately for Company X, Alice needed new wrenches before her monthly payments would exceeded the price of the wrenches. So how did they have the money? Well, they have more customers than just Alice. They use some of the money that they get from others to help buy the wrench set in the same way some of Alice’s money is used with other problems as a way to socialize the losses.
As you might guess, this requires more people. More people contributing at once means a bigger pool of money that can cover bigger individual losses when the time comes. As such, Insurance Company X uses a portion of the money they get to recruit more users and thereby make their system work better.
But also greed. Lots and lots of greed.
Don’t forget the part where Insurance Company X calculates the maximum amount of damages they could be liable for from marauding flash mobs for a given affected area then raises the rates on all of their customers in an even bigger area to compensate so they can never lose money on Alice’s wrenches.
Source: I’m a mathematician who spent a summer working in the office of a roofing company and I literally watched homeowners insurance companies do it.
Also the billions they make in profit is not going to compensate anyone. And the billions they invest on share markets and lobbying to make the society more like they want is definitely not to the benefit of the society either.
Yeah, I wrote elsewhere that I wish medical insurers were required to be 501©28 (I think that was the number). It specifically states that they are not allowed to lobby or fund political organizations/candidates.
Not trying to speak up for any insurance company and will never say that the example is a good reflection of reality. Just showing a rough outline in how advertising and recruiting customers -could- be beneficial to the policy holder. It is as much a reflection of reality as a stick man is an anatomic model for study.
Although what you write is correct, you somehow made it sound like a Ponzi scheme 😅
I thought we were being invited to a commune.
There are two reasons
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The market is saturated. Everybody pretty much already has insurance and they only shop for it when they have a reason to. So you want them to have your company’s name on their mind when the time comes. The biggest source of new customers are people who switch from someone else.
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GEICO was having name recognition problems when it transitioned from covering government employees exclusively.(Government Employees Insurance Company) This is where the lizard mascot came from. It was a huge success and other insurance companies followed suit. What we have now is a sort of arms race where all the major companies spend ridiculous amounts on advertising, but nobody wants to scale back for fear of being buried by their competitors ads.
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On every single professional sports game I’ve ever seen, every single show, every single channel. Isn’t this our fucking money you’re meant to give out should, god forbid, something happen?
While there’s certainly no redeeming feature to be found in the advertising industry, I feel like you might be missing the point of insurance. An insurance does not safe-keep “your” money. You pay insurance for a service, you then receive the service and your money is gone, spent, as if you had bought groceries. The service you receive is what is called “coverage” but what is more easily thought of as “immunity against bankruptcy due to X”, X being the insurance case. That’s what you buy.
Figuring out how to best allocate the money is up to the insurance - it’s their money, after all.
Yes, but spending the money creates more of an incentive and more pressure to figure out how to skimp on payouts
The only issue with that is their prices go up if their costs go up. Kind of like how grocery stores claim that theft causes prices to go up. It is their money, though it does feel bad paying them.
i absolutely disagree. the way insurance works is you all pay into it and they use that money for claims. it’s literally our money.
i absolutely disagree. the way insurance works is you all pay into it and they use that money for claims. it’s literally our money.
Again, you do not “pay into” anything. There’s no pool or fund or growing personal account. You buy a service. There is an exchange of goods and services here. As you receive the service, the money ceases to be yours.
Whether or not other people file claims with the insurance doesn’t matter, just like it doesn’t matter whether or not the baker buys new furniture after selling bread to you. They’re not paying the furniture store with your money, they’re paying the furniture store with their own money that became theirs as soon as you relinquished it to them in exchange for the bread.
Before choosing your insurance provider, google the company and “combined ratio”. Anything over 100 and they are paying out more than they are making. Investors want to see a combined ratio in the mid 90s, so if you are not an investor maybe you want the ones with high CR? Or they might be wasting it I guess, but either way less savvy I suppose.
One reason insurance ads are so stupid is that they are tightly regulated as to what they can actually say. They’re not allowed to make big promises. So you get lizards talking to car tires or whatever the fuck.
15 minutes could save you 15% or more. Or it could save you less. Probably less or none at all. The point is that it could save you 15%
Well, it’s not your money. You’re gambling with them, your bet is that you’ll get sick or have an accident within X period of time, they’re gambling that you won’t. At the same time, to uphold your gamble, you have to do everything any sane person would do to avoid illness or accidents.
You pay the ante up-front, just like on gambling tables, that’s no longer your money. You’re down that money.
But, if your gamble gets an out, you get payed big time. Hopefully in the form of them covering a portion or a totality of your healthcare expenses. It’s a big dangerous casino, and as usual, the house always has the edge.
Except some people don’t get paid big time. A lot of people actually. Because they like to waste all the ante’d money on stuff like these stupid ads.
Except the casino can refuse to pay out for any reason at all
Naming it gambling and then having it required by the government to operate a vehicle seems like a bad analogy.
I know, but that’s what literally it is. It’s even the historical origin of insurance as a concept. If you win, they have to pay your liabilities, if insurance wins, that means there hasn’t been any major accident or harm done. Either way, for the government, it’s a win-win. Either all it’s fine, or someone is ready to pay up the costs. The problem is, of course, scummy insurers who refuse to pony up their end of the bargain because they blew the money on ads, cocaine and hookers.
Insurance company are subject to regulations. They are lots of different regulations for different types of insurance and different states. The goals are to ensure that they are able to pay out when things go wrong, and to ensure a fair consumer practice. Generally all of the premiums they collect are supposed to be payed out and a large percent of the money is supposed to be held in reserve. They are supposed to be making money on investing the premiums.
It’s not about them winning the bet that they won’t have to pay. If they won that bet too much, it would be reflected in too high premiums, and competitors would just under cut them.
Ahhh, the Free Market™ in action. When human suffering is the only economically viable option.
/s
What, are you just gonna not have insurance? Something could go wrong! You don’t wanna go bankrupt because of a health problem, do you? Also, we can’t guarantee you won’t still go bankrupt with our insurance, but you won’t have to pay for basic drugs! Maybe…
I live in Canada and used to work as an adjuster and dated an American broker. There are many good insurers in the US, none of them advertise. Go to an honest broker and they’ll tell you about those boring good ones.
The differences in our systems were astonishing. Those advertised insurers let you go around with basically no coverage. I can’t believe your minimum third party liability amounts, especially considering the crazy medical costs in your country. It’s just over a tenth of the minimum we allow in my province, and we have socialized health care and more robust social safety nets. A serious accident will ruin you for life if you take that cockney lizard’s policy. He’s a scam artist from the mean streets of London.
I’m nowhere close to the insurance industry but I had sort of noticed from various stories.
The idea I had of what insurance is supposed to do seems to be based on how it works in Canada. If you want to take a big risk on losing your car, home, license or whatever then paying insurance even a high amount make sense.
Comparitively in the US, particularly in healthcare you seem screwed whether you get insurance or not. Americans get the freedom to pay hundreds of dollars a month, just to have to pay a minimum of more thousands if something does happen. In Canada, we don’t have universal dental yet and a full checkup, xray, cleaning and fluoride without insurance is about 600 CAD or ~440USD. I don’t know how much dental costs down South…
Yeah, insurance is a fundamental, necessary piece of civilization and has existed since before Hammurabi. But it has also been abused by profiteers since then too, and it’s not always easy to tell the difference. In a cut-throat, free market, capitalist driven economy, the incentive is to cover nothing for high premiums. A scam, essentially. Add a law where corporations are people and unlimited political donations is free speech and you’ll have enourmous pressure put on politicians to keep the insurance industry unregulated (except making buying it mandatory). Thus Geiko is allowed to exist. Lower premiums, but you are essentially uninsured for anything more than a minor fender bender. Paying premiums for nothing. This is bad for everyone involved in an accident except the insurance companies.
In a cut-throat, free market, capitalist driven economy, the incentive is to cover nothing for high premiums. A scam, essentially.
Wouldn’t that deter potential clients from purchasing your products though and go with the competitor who actually offers better terms?
Not if you have an anthropomorphic lizard telling you to buy theirs
Shit, I’m not from the US, but now I’ve realized that their ads are so pervasive, I’ve seen them before as well. And now I also realized that we have a Canadian equivalent.
I don’t know anything, and to avoid complications, what kinds of legal minimums does Canada require?
Here in BC we have a minimum of $200,000 liability insurance. We don’t separate based on property or injury, 200k covers all. But only low income drivers stop at 200K, $3Million is the most common liability amount. If you end up accidentally crippling a kid, you will require every penny that 3million. We don’t advertise our insurance at all. Insurers must have a reserve on hand to cover every single policy plus 10 million, I’m not sure what those numbers are in the US, it wouldn’t surprise me if they were much more lax. The Insurance Act of BC is a beautiful piece of legislation with the insured’s best interest in mind, not the insurer’s shareholders.
The amount the company must maintain on hand depends on the state. In some states it’s less than 1% of the policies written. Most of the time they only hold enough out of their premiums to cover an average of 2-3 years of claims.
The reason it’s so low is because of federal disaster relief when something big happens. The insurance companies advocate for it to be called a federal disaster. Then the government steps in and foots part of the bill. The poor are usually left losing everything.
Thank you!
