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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Because they make more money that way.
In order to stop them, you’d need a large percentage of customers go out of their way to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
In order to stop them, you’d need a large percentage of customers go out of their way to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
Or we’d need to recognize incorporation as the social contract that it was supposed to be, and start demanding public benefits in exchange for the companies being granted those privileges.
Merely restricting advertising is thinking extremely small compared to what they owe us, but hey, might as well throw it on the list anyway.
Fascinating read. what would be the economical impact if this was to return as charters with limited power and duration?
More public funding, less corporate interference in our government’s processes. We might actually find that Congress and state legislators listen to their constituents instead of conflicting corporate interests.
to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
This was basically my grandfather’s modus operandi. He wouldn’t buy anything he saw in an ad. Dude was a nuclear physicist, so maybe he was on to something.
And while it’d be pretty hard to do that today, I always try and keep it in mind when I buy stuff. I ask myself if I feel like I’m being pressured to buy something, and to try to always be willing to walk away without buying. You can always decide later, and buy it then.
Bought a bottle of scotch once that said “The greatest advertisement is a quality product.” I would have to agree.
The funny thing is that was the advertisement
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Dude was a nuclear physicist, so maybe he was on to something.
Let’s not go attributing success in one area as relevant to being smart in another, unrelated area, even when they’re right. I prefer the other guy who worked in the industry agreeing rather than a nuclear physicist. Unless nuclear physicists typically get their degree by researching the insurance industry and their quality in relationship to advertisement budgets.
I am not a nuclear physicist but have also been practicing that concept. Show me an ad that I don’t want to see? I Boycott.
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.
It’s worse than that even. Most of those ads are for “Medicare Advantage,” a criminal scam that Congressional members of a particular political persuasion cooked up to allow corporations to be a middleman between you and your Medicare benefits. When clueless people call and sign up because they think they’re going to get free money, they end up getting fucked out of as much of their benefits as the company can extract, up to 20% according to the rules, but who pays attention to if they play by the rules? You probably guessed it. Oh and just as a cherry on top, once you sign up, you can’t change your mind and go back, you’re off Medicare for good.
Car insurance ads are vastly better for people, for the economy, and even for road safety than health insurance companies are for people.
Health insurance, as a market, is an externality.
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.
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…
It’s not, that’s wby it only occur in USA
Lol #MAGA
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…
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.
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.
My wife worked for an insurance company for most of a decade as the complaint liaison with the states regulating body on insurance.
Insurance companies in the U.S. come in two types.
Type A: Rely on repeat business and word of mouth to slowly grow their business. They pay out reasonable and fair amounts based upon the loss. They follow all applicable laws/regulations and operate in good faith. These companies are quick to reject people who have bad histories.
Type B: Rely on recruiting new customers constantly by excessive advertising or purchasing other smaller companies. Pay out well below the market on anything they can and flat out refuse claims until lawsuits start. These companies routinely break state and federal laws because the fines are less than the profits. These companies prey on the lower income, elderly, and poorly informed. The larger companies have hundreds of brands to give the illusion of choice to the consumer.
Any amounts of excessive marketing by and insurance company indicates that they are shit. Also research into who owns any the brand they are are marketing. If you recognize the parent company as advertising, they are shit.
That seems to line up with my reading of those heavily advertised, cheap policies. You pay for nothing then get left in the lurch, owing potentially millions. It should be illegal, it’s totally predatory.
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
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 outstanding claim 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!
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.
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.
Not sure what the issue is here, but this may be a US-centric problem…?
Here in Australia, insurance companies are required to demonstrate sufficient means to cover the risk they carry on their books. We have a government body (APRA) that regulates and routinely audits this (along with other requirements).
What the company spends on coffee, furniture or marketing has no bearing on this - those are expenses for them to manage after they satisfy the above requirements.
It’s not about being able to cover their liabilities, but charging ridiculous rates partially due to the fact that they also need to pay multimillion dollar advertising budgets. Or worse, bring the price down by giving shockingly low coverage that is somehow still legal.
Worse still, our healthcare system relies nearly solely on private health insurance… and yes they do it too. See: MetLife Stadium
It’s not about being able to cover their liabilities
I’m referring to OP’s assertion that “Isn’t this our fucking money you’re meant to give out should, god forbid, something happen?”.
I don’t disagree that the insurance industry is a cottage industry, largely built on/supported by FUD, but that wasn’t the point of my reply.
One of the unethical behaviors that is becoming all too common, is for an insurer to deny by default. Then if you want the reimbursement you’re owed, you have to fight for it, and not ebpveryone knows how or is willing to.
Oh I’m sorry, being impaled on a metal pole is a pre-existing condition, so you don’t deserve coverage for it anyway! Also two hearing aids is experimental and not coveted! Mmmkay go fuck yourself byyyeeee.
That’s why I purchase a plan from a company that doesn’t advertise.
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.
I’m assuming you’re in the US.
Do non profit or cooperative insurance companies exist? They would seem like a less evil option if available.
They do.
In Germany there is VVAG, “Versicherungsverein auf Gegenseitigkeit” (insurance association based on mutuality), which is the legal form for cooperative insurance as regular cooperatives (Genossenschaften) cannot insure legally.
There are, but a lot of them usually require something to qualify for their coverage and aren’t as large as national companies. The smaller companies usually don’t have as large an appetite for risk, and will therefore only provide discounts to less risky drivers.
Can you share some names of them? To help me get started researching them
Farmers, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, Thrivent, USAA, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Family, Nationwide, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance#United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_inter-insurance_exchange#Examples
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.
Advertising. They make it seem like the best thing since sliced bread so if someone is considering changing providers, that company comes to mind. The more they repeat it the more likely people are to think of it when considering options. It doesn’t work on everyone, but this tactic has enough supporting data for them to keep dumping money into it.
To answer your question about why they are allowed to do it, I would imagine there are little to no regulations on how much is spent on advertising campaigns. It all depends on what a business can afford to spend. Since insurance companies are all about denying coverage, I’d imagine they have quite a bit to dump into advertising. I haven’t looked into it that much, but it looks like they can also claim these as business expenses and get tax write-offs. It wouldn’t be surprising if they tacked on other expenses to the advertising budget and claimed those as write-offs as well.
another one of those write-off business expenses is the tremendous amount of money spent lobbying to keep regulations regarding advertising (and other unseemly business practices) at bay.
