Hey, thanks! What do I owe you?
Hi ! I am Jimmy Goldman-Sachs, and I’ll be your executioner today ! Before I strangle you, can I interest you in our partners’ extensive range of caskets ?
Eh, just make me a beneficiary on your policy.
For all the outrage, a lot of the investors in viaticals lost huge amounts of money. Their specialty was buying the life insurance policies of the HIV positive. Then along came the new antiviral drugs and lots of people literally got up off their death beds. Which means the guys who bought those life insurance policies lost big time.
Thing is, life insurance is a weird product. And if you don’t have any dependents, life insurance doesn’t make any sense.
Is it hard to imagine it becoming such a large index that people say “hey guys-- those new antivirals? I think they need a few more years of research.”?
Thing is, some of the major insurance companies have “accelerated death benefits” which give terminally-ill policyowners access to the proceeds before death. There is little, if any, reason to sell the policy to an investor, especially for pennies on the dollar, which is what most viatical investors pay.
The moral aspect aside–and if you don’t get why benefiting from others’ misery is a should make you feel guilty, there probably isn’t an argument that will convince–this is the social problem it creates.
If you’re a big-time investor, it would not be at all difficult to manipulate disparate markets to obtain huge profits. How interested would an investor in death bonds be in public health insurance? Maybe opposed enough to spend millions to lobby against it?
What if s/he was also invested in a health insurance company? Deny coverage, patient dies, profits for both the health insurance company and the death bond packet go up.