Public enemy number one

For Public Enemy Number One -- chronologically from the POV of this blog, if not necessarily in terms of the threat they pose to our mental and fiscal health -- I hereby nominate the insurance industry.

Imagine any other business model that works like this:

I will suck up hours of your valuable time filling out endless, meaningless forms in triplicate with trivia. Truthful answers will likely come back to haunt you and unthruths may also if you DARE try to make use of the service for which you are about to pay dearly. When or if you do, I will brow-beat you, belittle you, question your integrity, doubt your every statement, make you sweat nervously and feel like a criminal -- in short, do everything in my power to humiliate you into submission and make you want to crawl back into the hole from which you first emerged. If you insist on pursuing your claim I will do everything within my power to stall, make you feel guilty for having had bad luck, and insist that you pay nearly half of what we should rightly be paying you in the first place, so that filing a claim in the first place is simply not worth the hassle, expense and degradation.

In most civilized democracies, the inventor of such an idea would be run out of town on a rail, or at least charged with racketeering. Consider the unreasonably excessive profitability of the insurance companies. Even in the wake of 9/11, Katrina, and everything else, it is obscene and unconscionable.

My gripes with the extortion, I mean insurance, racket are many. One of which is this: I share a house with three other fully functional adults. all of whom I have personally known for many years and all of whom are as honest as the day is long. Yet because none of them are related to me by blood, I pay an additional 50% over and above my premium becase of the "extra risk" they pose. Whereas I know people with crack-addled brothers who would just as soon slit your throat as look you in the eye, and because they are blood relations, they pay no additional premium. Because in the infinite wisdom of the insurance industry, crack addicts are apparently unlikely to steal anything of value from you, just because you're related.

Did I mention the premiums? Several years ago I owned a CD collection in the thousands. Had the whole thing catalogued and cross-referenced, too (trainspotter that I am). So I went and bought renter's insurance for the apartment I lived in at the time, only to be told that the $400 annual premium -- which, incidentally, was about $150 more per annum than most of my home-owning friends paid to insure their entire houses -- did not cover my CDs. For that, they said, I had to buy a special rider at the cost of $5 per $100 valuation. Considering my entire collection was conservatively valued at $85,000 (retail replacement value, assuming many of the rarities and imports could be replaced at all)... well, you do the math. I reckon that works out to over $4,000. Per year. Even though the apartment's security system was hard-wired into police HQ.

Guess who couldn't afford to get insurance? Guess who no longer has a lifetime collection of CDs?

My rent eats up about 40-50% of what I clear monthly. My food eats another significant chunk of that. (That's what I get for trying to eat healthy. Ever notice junk food is so much cheaper than produce? But that's another rant for another day.) What's left is now being eaten up by insurance.

Thank fuck I don't own a car.