Friday, December 09, 2005

Insurance, or, Acts of the Godless

I must admit to having certain reservations about the insurance industry as a whole, and my inability to access it in particular. There's certainly no denying that having had a Grade 3 cancer at 35 makes me a "bad risk", and probably Bill Gates himself couldn't afford my premiums, but wouldn't it be kind to humour me a little and assume the best? I'd be happy to invest in a relatively modest policy, just to pay for having my body shoveled up off the sidewalk or whatever; I don't think it's at all fair that my poor daughter, who's had to put up with me for her entire life after all, should then be expected to fork out to dispose of me. However, even the specialist Insurance-For-Oldies-and-the-Almost-Dead or whatever fall about laughing when I apply.

With genetic testing on the horizon, things can only get worse. Consider my daughter, for example; both her mother and grandmother have had breast cancer, what do you think her chances of paying less than a pound of flesh per month for life/health insurance will be in the 21st century? But is this either fair or sound economic sense? Hold on while I slap myself round the face with a frozen haddock for introducing the concept of "fairness" into Capitalism, will you? Right, that's better...... So, sound economic sense or not? I think not. We are, after all, mortal; each and every one of us is going to die at some time or another. Young healthy people are far more likely to indulge in stupid and gratuitous recklessness (jumping out of aeroplanes or drinking alcopops) than people like me who've had a brush with the Grim Reaper and take the whole thing a bit more seriously.

It seems to me, too, that there's a hidden, sinister side to life insurance. Consider daytime TV; according to such excellent mirrors of reality as "Murder She Wrote" and "Diagnosis Murder", taking out life insurance is the practical equivalent of hiring a hitman to top yourself. $250,000 dollars seems to be quite sufficient to transform the most seemingly affectionate wife/daughter/secretary/mailman and/or husband/chauffeur/significant other into a homicidal nutter. It seems to me that an observant person might notice such tendencies in a spouse or partner before the fact; I would certainly be enormously suspicious if my partner decided to buy me life insurance. "Can't I have a CD instead?" "No. Sign this. Now - can you spell 'suicide'?"

Another thing that (excuse me) pisses me right off is this "Act of God" business; what's that all about then? For starters, I think that the kind of disaster usually refferred to as an AoG is more likely to be an AoS (Act of Satan), since I doubt an ever-loving God gets his jollies by pushing mountains on top of people. What's the proposed scenario? There He is, say, lolling about on His cloud feeling a bit bored, and suddenly "Hey, I think I'll just zap this poor zero with a lightning bolt! Wehey, that's cheered me up!" No, I think the insurance industry is being not only preposterous but possibly blasphemous in suggesting that the Good Lord (note the "Good" bit, if you please) would behave so frivoulously. If I were God, I'd sue for Defamation of Character.

Plus, if you subscribe to this particular bit of mythology, anybody dying anytime is an AoG, isn't it? In fact, insuring against death at all is a kind of monstrous hubris on the part of the insurer and the insuree, not to mention pretty damn stupid. Effectively they're betting that we'll live long enough to make the monthly payments accrue to more than the payout, and we (poor saps!) are betting that we won't - i.e. that we'll die in time to make ourselves a profit. And maybe that is indeed a great consolation to some weird people; maybe, as they lie half-crushed by a bus and bleeding like a stuck pig, the thought "Oh well, at least I shafted the Alliance and Leicester!" really does flash through their minds.....