Insurance - It Never Ends

Copyright © 2012 CR Edmunds

Vehicle

First you just paid for your own repairs if you got into an accident.  And if you hurt someone else or you damaged their car, the court system would make you pay for that, too.

Then the government said you had to get vehicle insurance because you might get in an accident and hurt someone else or damage their car, even if you are an excellent driver.  Even if you never have a claim, you keep paying and you get no interest on all those payments - the money’s just down the drain.  But it’s supposed to be okay because your money is being used in a pool to cover other people’s accidents because there isn’t enough money in the pool to cover all the insurance payments being made.

And then you had to get vehicle insurance because the other guy in an accident that you might never get into might not have insurance.  Even though you pay it month after month, year after year, you keep paying that one so that all the other people who haven’t paid for their own insurance or for the other uninsured guy in their accident are covered by insurance anyway.  You know, they still call it insurance, but it’s really a tax, isn't it?  

Medical

First you just took responsibility for your own health and if you got ill or injured, you paid the healer, doctor and/or hospital yourself.  If you couldn’t afford it and you couldn’t beg or borrow the money, you died.

Then insurance made it easier to not worry about medical bills, so you stopped taking responsibility for your own health and if you got ill or injured, you let the medical system take care of you and let the insurance company pay for the doctor and or hospital.  You still ended up dying – it just took longer and cost more, but that was okay because there was a pool of insurance money that covered it.

And then everyone was forced to get medical insurance because so many people were no longer taking responsibility for their health that the insurance money pool wasn’t big enough.  So now even the people who are healthy and willing to pay for their own medical costs have to get insurance.  And if you don’t pay for it as insurance, you pay for it as a tax – at least the government is honest enough to call the spade a spade - but you pay no matter what, and you pay as long as you’re still alive to be paying, whether it benefits you or not.

What’s next?

It’s only logical for every homeowner to be forced to get disaster insurance that covers tornado, hurricane, flood, mudslide, earthquake, blizzard, fire and tsunami, no matter where they live or what the risk is of any given disaster.  Because, you know, that will make the insurance pool bigger so everyone can keep building houses in inappropriate places and building houses that aren’t constructed to withstand natural disasters. We need to be sure that homeowners keep getting compensated when a natural disaster wipes them out regardless of the reason it happens, or how often it happens. 

We need insurance to cover food shortages, including contaminated food.  Because, you know, having insurance will ensure that there's always food in the grocery store, and having insurance will compensate for price gougers when natural disasters wipe out food crops, or there's no fuel to bring food in from other countries (we can't grow food on agricultural land that housing developments now occupy, of course).

And what about the rest of the world?  We should all start paying for the poor people who live in other countries who don’t have insurance of any kind – they need medical care, they need to drive vehicles, they need coverage for their houses in case of disaster.  And those bad foreign people who just don’t want to pay for insurance – we need to pay for them too, since the insurance pool needs to be large enough to cover everything and everyone.

We all should start paying into the insurance pool now for future generations, too, because they will need coverage - given the economy, they won’t be able to earn enough to pay for their own vehicle, medical, homeowner’s or food shortage insurance.    

There must be something else that could be insured.  We don't want people being responsible for themselves - it isn't fair!

Oh yeah:  We should start paying for insurance for insurance, because after a while I, for one, won’t be earning enough money to pay for all the mandatory insurance so you all should pay into the pool to cover me.      And heck, why should I pay all that out now?  It'll never stop and I'll never get ahead.  Maybe I should just stop working and let that insurance pool cover all my needs.

Sounds like a plan.