Is insurance just a big scam?

People don't appreciate that bad things can happen to them.

I was a happy, healthy 30 year-old. My first child was born and soon diagnosed with hemophilia. His medicine costs about $35k a month before insurance.

Reasonable will point out that it should never cost that much and we have ridiculous inefficiencies in our health care system. I would agree. Nevertheless, insurance financially saved us.

It makes sense to reduce your risk against rare events you can't cover.

I would agree that many people are probably over-insured because they buy policies for things they should just cover out of pocket if they can. Many people could probably justify taking higher risk health insurance plans with high deductibles who are unlikely to need care and can cover the 5k-10k if a bad things happens. Kind of just depends on how much you like to gamble.

Licensed agent in P/C life and health insurance here. If you live in PA hit me up for a quote haha!

Friend of mine just finished his final round of chemo at $32,000 per visit. Because he has good insurance he is out $0.

It's only a "scam" until you need it.

You think like a child. Be quite, the grown ups are talking.

Insurance is a scam when it is mandated because in that case people don't have a chance to transact in an unmediated marketplace and there is a high incentive for insurance companies to collude with service providers to fix pricing. Furthermore it encourages people to take less than efficient precaution because they don't feel the impact of risky behavior as forcefully as they might in the absence of insurance. The solution is to end all insurance mandates and to encourage the creation of functioning marketplaces with incentives that are aligned with efficient precaution.

The opposite seems to be the case. Insurers have a vested interest in paying out as little as possible, and negotiate payments that are better than you can get on your own. If you pay for a MRI out of pocket you are paying more than the insurance company will pay. Car insurance companies negotiate down the estimate provided by the body shop, at least they did in my case.

Not qualified for hemlibra? Type B? There are non-insurance very good programs for hemophilia and from your post it doesn't sound like your hematologist informed you about them.

Insurance is only stupid if you have massive cash reserves set aside for a rainy day. If you drive a $50K car and you can replace it with the snap of a finger, no big deal. But this isn't reality for most people.

Even more for life insurance. I wish I had $4 million just sitting around for my wife and 3 young kids if I unexpectedly die tomorrow. But I don't. So I pay $65 a month just in case.

You only buy insurance for things that would destroy your life. So house insurance makes sense, so does health insurance, and car liability insurance (but probably not car insurance for your car unless your car is too expensive for your income). Life insurance if your partner or kids can't suport themselves also makes sense, but not for a lot of people. Dental insurance almost never makes sense, it only covers like 1-2k worth of work max, which is by definition the type of insurance to avoid. The only reason to buy something like dental insurance is if owning it, and getting "free" checkups, makes you go to the dentist when you otherwise wouldn't.

Which is why we should support universal government run healthcare. A private insurance mandate, just adds 20% profit to companies for an unessassary service.

Meanwhile, back in reality healthcare is only so ridiculously expensive because Democrats injected the government into health insurance.

There are 3 elements to health care. Accessibility to care, quality of care, and the cost of the care.

It is naive liberal nonsense to pretend that all 3 elements can be maximized at the same time.

Universal healthcare minimizes cost at the expense of accessibility and greatly reduces the quality.

yes
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You're confusing two things into one here.

1. The very idea of insurance and running an insurance company. It's not a secret, it's math and common sense. They calculate the risks of certain events to be as sure as possible that the payments they collect would sum up to more than the payments they have to make. It's what they live off. Same event could financially destroy you if it happened but the payment won't (shouldn't) destroy the insurance company. You're paying for them to take that risk for you. It's fair.

2. The insurance industry is a magnet for super annoying people and straight up crooks who would try to trick you into buying insurance you don't actually need and would always try to find a clause in fine print to avoid paying you in case the unfortunate event really happens. That's a sad fact which doesn't completely ruin the generally useful concept of insurance.

Hello, I had several bad situations with me in which it was the insurance of my life, car, house, etc. that helped me. I think that this is the little guarantor of security that people choose instead of thinking about whether this is a huge money-laundering scheme or not. I recently bought a car and immediately applied for insurance services to https://www.youi.com.au/car-insurance, and as soon as I made everything out, I immediately became calmer for myself and my car. I choose to be calm than to be stressed forever

Actual insurance is not a scam. Insurance pays you or your family as the result of a catastrophic event that could not have been anticipated.

The thing is that most so called insurance products are mostly not insurance but rather a service contract with some small insurance component bundled with the product. The problem with service contracts is that they are expensive because they add a layer of bureaucracy between the buyer and seller in the form of a claim and approval process. They are also problematic because the payer has profit incentive to not provide the contracted service (i.e. find a way to deny the claim).

So to answer your question, yes insurance is a scam to the extent that the insurance company markets a service contract as insurance.

This is your opinion about insurance, but I think that if you have a good salary, then it's worth spending some percent of it on health insurance first of all, and only then cars or houses. Recently, my friend was hospitalized with pneumonia, and he would have had to pay about 50 thousand dollars for treatment. Still, the insurance company paid about 85% of all treatment for him, do you imagine? And it seems to me that his $200 a month has paid off. For my musical instruments, I recently took out insurance from these guys https://www.victorcknight.co.uk because they cost a lot of money. If they break, I will have to pay huge amounts of money for their repair. That's why I don't agree with you.

It depends on the type of insurance. Some I wouldn't mess with. Others, I wouldn't get. For example if you go to Argos here and buy a kettle for £10 you get offered a 3 year insurance package. The same for cheap toasters and so on. Those deals aren't worth it at all. I wouldn't get insurance on a mobile phone. I don't have contents insurance because I worked out I'd have to lose all of my possessions once every eight years over and over for it to make sense. I have a friend (well, an ex) in central London who pays a few hundred every year for contents insurance and it doesn't make sense. The bill must be thousands upon thousands by now.

But it depends on your situation. If you live in a one bedroom flat with minimal possessions, an old computer and a basic smartphone, it's not worth it. If you have a family of four in a large house with a lot of possessions, different situation.

A renters policy typically also covers liability. If someone were to slip and fall at your place they may sue you. The policy would cover that.

Im in the industry but not an agent. I dislike paying for insurance as much as the next person. In the US, rates are artificially high due to the extreme litigation. Do you see more billboards for insurance companies or Lawyers? Ambulance chasers have been big for a long time. I’m FL we now have water pipe and hurricane lawyers. More than half the payouts on litigated claims go to the attorney, the homeowner usually gets 30-40% of the settlement. M

Five insurance companies have gone insolvent in the last 5 years, and it’s not because of hurricanes.

insurancejournal.com

St. Johns Insurance Insolvent, to be Liquidated, Florida DFS Reports

@ijournal

St. Johns Insurance Co., one of the larger property/casualty insurers based in Florida, is now insolvent and will soon be liquidated. The Florida

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