Plus, if the government gets involved, all sorts of actuarial estimates will end up being wrong. And we can’t have the hedge fund investors and CEOs losing money, especially when they’ve already hemorraged so badly in this recession.
So, remember: universal healthcare is a commie plot, the corporations and wealthy aren’t funding the troglodyte righties to oppose health care reform, and why don’t you sell Goldman your life insurance policy to show just how patriotic you are?
Can we just fast-forward this to the part where the rich have us fight in rings and the losers wind up in a nice confit de homme?
Let me see if I have this straight: I “sell” my life insurance policy to get a fraction of the payout immediately, and in return a large amoral corporation somewhere has a vested interest in having me die as soon as possible?
Do I still have to pay premiums on top of that, or does the buyer pay them? Does my estate get any money from the policy when I die? How much money does the buyer stand to make from my early death? How much do the services of a competent hitman cost?
Its been done before. They are called “viatical payments”. I first heard of it in reference to AIDS patients, who were offered a “buy-out” on their life insurance so that they could tend to crucial matters, or pay for hospice end-of-life care, that sort of thing. Read a long article about it, maybe it was the New Yorker? It covered the story of a bright young entrepenuer (or “ghoul”, depending) who made quite a killing (har!) selling such payments to eager investors. The best selling points were a) the amount of discount and b) the current state of the AIDS patients health, number of viable T-cells, etc. Essentially, how long they might be expected to live.
The investor got lucky if the AIDS patient got one of those opportunistic infections, lost out if the uncooperative, selfish creep lived longer than expected.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that many, if not most, of the AIDS victims were eager to get it, having no money, no prospects, and certainly no insurance.
No, the buyer would pay the premium, and he’d be getting the payout when you died. You’re selling the policy to the buyer…he’ll get the benefit once you die, and he’ll assume the risk that you’ll live long enough that the payout will be less than what was put in.
I don’t particularly see what the problem is with this is (except for the potential of hitmen). As a society, we’ve already accepted the idea of life insurance, so why not be able to buy and sell those existing policies?
So, again, what’s wrong with it? I don’t understand the moral outrage.
When you buy life insurance, you’re taking a risk. You’re buying the life insurance with the assumption that you’ll die before you’ve paid enough in premiums to exceed the payoff upon your death. The life insurance company is hoping for the reverse.
So, once your have that policy, that’s an asset, in the same way that a bond is an asset. A bond is a promise to pay a fixed amount at a future date. So, what happens if you have a bond, but you need money now, before the maturity date of the bond? You sell it to another investor to get money now, rather than the promise of a future payout.
So, if you have a life insurance policy, how is that any different? It’s also the promise to pay a fixed amount at a future date (although a date based on an event rather than a fixed date), why shouldn’t you be able to sell it and have someone else buy it?
elucidator points out the entrepreneur making the viatical payments to the AIDS patients, and I say good for him. What he did was a positive good and he helped those patients’ lives. As was mentioned, they didn’t have health insurance, they didn’t have money, they didn’t have prospects. If he didn’t buy those life insurance policies from them, they would have died sooner or they would have died less comfortably.
So, the lesson of the financial crisis wasn’t that our homes and our retirement were too important to make assets out of. It was, apparently . . . they weren’t important enough! Let’s make an asset out of the one thing even more important: our very lives!
No thanks. I do not want some index to go up when a shitload of people die. The next Katrina or 9/11 could well spark a revolution.
Let’s say that you have life insurance, with your wife as the beneficiary, and then you sell that policy to me. When you die, it won’t make a difference to the insurance company whether they pay the benefit to your wife or me. It won’t make any difference to anyone other than your wife and me.
And what if “you” are a traded index? No fucking thanks. I don’t want to commodify human life any further than it already is. It’s sick. It’s sociopathic and it’s sick.
Provided the cut is not absurdly excessive (cf: payday loan), well, probably not all that much, at least ethically. Provided you’re fine with a fundamentally ghoulish enterprise that leverages the desperation of the sick, elderly, and impoverished—and come on, who isn’t?
Myself, I prefer to minimize the number of people who stand to receive a significant financial windfall from my death. My wife seems trustworthy enough so far, but I’ve got my eye on her.
You know what else I used to be sentimental for? My house. But by the time I bought a house, they were no longer a place to live and love and raise a family. They were a commodity to be bought and sold whimsically, for profit. I worked for Bear Stearns. A company that was “founded 80 years ago and survived the great depression and it’s going to be a soft landing even if all the other banks fail we’re going to survive and bahbuhbahbuhbah.” I presume I don’t have to tell you how that worked out. My wife works in an industry that is dependent on the economy and has had her hours cut, and hasn’t gotten a raise in 2 years.
And if you think a lot of people think disasters are allowed to happen now, just wait until there is a clear, traceable profit to be made. H1N1 will have been engineered on Wall Street, Barack Obama will have personally ordered 9/11:II to boost the economy before mid-terms, and big business will be directly responsible for each and every hurricane.
It’s a clusterfuck.
It’s callous.
No fucking thanks.
(And by the way, in case you were on the edge of your seat for the denouement: I’m typing this from a 2-bedroom apartment that we managed to uncomfortably cram most of our stuff into. Most.)
