Insurance Problems

[TXBLU]

Interesting. It occurs to me that Insurance companies are in business to make money, just like any other company. As far as I can tell, insurance companies have been making an overall profit for quite some time. I would even imagine that their margins have been consistantly increasing as well. When did you last hear of an insurance company that went out of business because it wasn't making money?

And yet, whenever a single segment has the slightest upward trend change in payouts, alarms and whistles go off in all the land to signal the impending insurance premium increase/coverage denial apocolypse for that segment, irrespective of the percentage of business that segment commands, or whether or not the carrier is actually losing money in that segment. Insurance companies have gotten so good as getting the public to believe the "poor me" stories the insurance companies tell whenever their profits aren't quite as spectacular as they would like, the public tends to just shrug it's shoulders at the increases in premiums and coverage restrictions imposed on them, sometimes seemingly arbitrarily.

If the insurance companies would provide detailed information about their losses versus profits overall, plus within the specific segment where they want to increase premiums, the public might be more sympathetic to their situation. I have never seen an insurance company provide that kind of information. They tend to only provide the statistics they need to justify increases. What I am saying is, I believe insurance companies use selective statistics, not complete data, to justify the increases.

While it may be true within a certain context that they are "losing money" in a particular segment, the insurance industry, just like the airlines and other industries, tell the public it is losing money when in reality it just isn't making as much as it planned to, hoped to, or told it's board of directors it was going to make. It happens all the time. Companies quote statistics to "prove" their points, when the truth is, they simply are committing lies of omission by not stating all the true facts and figures.

Beware the insurance company that wants to raise your rates. It may not be giving you all of the information it has. If it is justified, so be it. With the way things are now, we will never really know.

All that being said, I see no reason why an insurance carrier would NOT insist that drivers of very high performance automobiles attend driving schools that teach the art of high performance driving. I have attended racing schools five different times, and I have gotten faster on the race track, and safer on the street, every time. They insist on recurrent flight training for aircraft pilots, why not driver training for sprts car "pilots"? I think we would all feel safer if we knew that the guy in the Porsche or Ferrari (or Cobra) in the next lane actually knew what he was doing...