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Because they make more money that way.
In order to stop them, you'd need a large percentage of customers go out of their way to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
In order to stop them, you’d need a large percentage of customers go out of their way to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
Or we'd need to recognize incorporation as the social contract that it was supposed to be, and start demanding public benefits in exchange for the companies being granted those privileges.
Merely restricting advertising is thinking extremely small compared to what they owe us, but hey, might as well throw it on the list anyway.
to purchase policies from companies with the lowest advertising budgets.
This was basically my grandfather's modus operandi. He wouldn't buy anything he saw in an ad. Dude was a nuclear physicist, so maybe he was on to something.
And while it'd be pretty hard to do that today, I always try and keep it in mind when I buy stuff. I ask myself if I feel like I'm being pressured to buy something, and to try to always be willing to walk away without buying. You can always decide later, and buy it then.
Bought a bottle of scotch once that said "The greatest advertisement is a quality product." I would have to agree.
The funny thing is that was the advertisement
Dude was a nuclear physicist, so maybe he was on to something.
Let's not go attributing success in one area as relevant to being smart in another, unrelated area, even when they're right. I prefer the other guy who worked in the industry agreeing rather than a nuclear physicist. Unless nuclear physicists typically get their degree by researching the insurance industry and their quality in relationship to advertisement budgets.
This is one of a thousand reasons why the entire insurance industry should be burnt to the ground
Unrelated, but I saw an ad for a cremation company on the TV the other day. They said they had a 4.5 rating on trustpilot, and I spent too long wondering who left those reviews…
Car insurance ads are bad, but health insurance ads are worse. Every time I see one I wonder whose treatment got denied to pay for it.
It's worse than that even. Most of those ads are for "Medicare Advantage," a criminal scam that Congressional members of a particular political persuasion cooked up to allow corporations to be a middleman between you and your Medicare benefits. When clueless people call and sign up because they think they're going to get free money, they end up getting fucked out of as much of their benefits as the company can extract, up to 20% according to the rules, but who pays attention to if they play by the rules? You probably guessed it. Oh and just as a cherry on top, once you sign up, you can't change your mind and go back, you're off Medicare for good.
Car insurance ads are vastly better for people, for the economy, and even for road safety than health insurance companies are for people.
Health insurance, as a market, is an externality.
What, are you just gonna not have insurance? Something could go wrong! You don’t wanna go bankrupt because of a health problem, do you? Also, we can’t guarantee you won’t still go bankrupt with our insurance, but you won’t have to pay for basic drugs! Maybe…
i hop between geico, progressive, and allstate. after the 6month bait deal ends i just call and move over to the next competitors 6 month sweet deal.
It's easy to maintain, just 3 tabs on my browser and now you don't even have to talk to a person.
i learned after graduating in 2006 and walking face first into 2008s bullshit. if they want to hot potato lumps of debt, ill just hot potato competing services.
a petition to ban marketing, advertising, and sale of personal information in general would be a good way to have a chance at shattering big tech and commercial crap all at once, but it'll never happen 🙁
I live in Canada and used to work as an adjuster and dated an American broker. There are many good insurers in the US, none of them advertise. Go to an honest broker and they'll tell you about those boring good ones.
The differences in our systems were astonishing. Those advertised insurers let you go around with basically no coverage. I can't believe your minimum third party liability amounts, especially considering the crazy medical costs in your country. It's just over a tenth of the minimum we allow in my province, and we have socialized health care and more robust social safety nets. A serious accident will ruin you for life if you take that cockney lizard's policy. He's a scam artist from the mean streets of London.
My wife worked for an insurance company for most of a decade as the complaint liaison with the states regulating body on insurance.
Insurance companies in the U.S. come in two types.
Type A: Rely on repeat business and word of mouth to slowly grow their business. They pay out reasonable and fair amounts based upon the loss. They follow all applicable laws/regulations and operate in good faith. These companies are quick to reject people who have bad histories.
Type B: Rely on recruiting new customers constantly by excessive advertising or purchasing other smaller companies. Pay out well below the market on anything they can and flat out refuse claims until lawsuits start. These companies routinely break state and federal laws because the fines are less than the profits. These companies prey on the lower income, elderly, and poorly informed. The larger companies have hundreds of brands to give the illusion of choice to the consumer.
Any amounts of excessive marketing by and insurance company indicates that they are shit. Also research into who owns any the brand they are are marketing. If you recognize the parent company as advertising, they are shit.
That's why I purchase a plan from a company that doesn't advertise.
Not sure what the issue is here, but this may be a US-centric problem..?
Here in Australia, insurance companies are required to demonstrate sufficient means to cover the risk they carry on their books. We have a government body (APRA) that regulates and routinely audits this (along with other requirements).
What the company spends on coffee, furniture or marketing has no bearing on this - those are expenses for them to manage after they satisfy the above requirements.
It's not about being able to cover their liabilities, but charging ridiculous rates partially due to the fact that they also need to pay multimillion dollar advertising budgets. Or worse, bring the price down by giving shockingly low coverage that is somehow still legal.
Worse still, our healthcare system relies nearly solely on private health insurance.... and yes they do it too. See: MetLife Stadium
At one point around the enaction of Obama-care there was a dude with a combover that came around to our office to tell us that "yes, healthcare costs are high in America, but I'm here to tell you that insurance companies are not the problem."
So here he is: a guy lying to himself about his hair loss with a full-time job going around to different companies saying how insurance companies are not the problem...surely he couldn't be lying, a waste, or a lying waste.
I wonder if there's a correlation between wigs and weasel jobs like salesmen or estate agents.
If you can lie to yourself you can lie to anyone.
Let's put aside the many, many problems of insurance companies in reality and talk in terms of two parties acting in good faith for ease of demonstration.
Let's take random person Alice who has insured her wrench set at Insurance Company X. Her wrench set is very important to her job and she only believes in high quality tools, so it is quite expensive. So expensive, that if something were to happen to it, she might not be able to replace it right away. Instead, she pays Company X for an insurance policy. Alice can afford to pay a little bit every month and so this is a good set up.
Uh oh, an impromptu stomp band raided Alice's store and appropriated her wrenches as drumsticks. They're ruined! Luckily, Alice is insured and Insurance Company X pays her for replacement wrenches.
Unfortunately for Company X, Alice needed new wrenches before her monthly payments would exceeded the price of the wrenches. So how did they have the money? Well, they have more customers than just Alice. They use some of the money that they get from others to help buy the wrench set in the same way some of Alice's money is used with other problems as a way to socialize the losses.
As you might guess, this requires more people. More people contributing at once means a bigger pool of money that can cover bigger individual losses when the time comes. As such, Insurance Company X uses a portion of the money they get to recruit more users and thereby make their system work better.
But also greed. Lots and lots of greed.
Don't forget the part where Insurance Company X calculates the maximum amount of damages they could be liable for from marauding flash mobs for a given affected area then raises the rates on all of their customers in an even bigger area to compensate so they can never lose money on Alice's wrenches.
Source: I'm a mathematician who spent a summer working in the office of a roofing company and I literally watched homeowners insurance companies do it.
Although what you write is correct, you somehow made it sound like a Ponzi scheme 😅
I'm assuming you're in the US.
Do non profit or cooperative insurance companies exist? They would seem like a less evil option if available.
There are two reasons
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The market is saturated. Everybody pretty much already has insurance and they only shop for it when they have a reason to. So you want them to have your company's name on their mind when the time comes. The biggest source of new customers are people who switch from someone else.
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GEICO was having name recognition problems when it transitioned from covering government employees exclusively.(Government Employees Insurance Company) This is where the lizard mascot came from. It was a huge success and other insurance companies followed suit. What we have now is a sort of arms race where all the major companies spend ridiculous amounts on advertising, but nobody wants to scale back for fear of being buried by their competitors ads.
On every single professional sports game I’ve ever seen, every single show, every single channel. Isn’t this our fucking money you’re meant to give out should, god forbid, something happen?
While there's certainly no redeeming feature to be found in the advertising industry, I feel like you might be missing the point of insurance. An insurance does not safe-keep "your" money. You pay insurance for a service, you then receive the service and your money is gone, spent, as if you had bought groceries. The service you receive is what is called "coverage" but what is more easily thought of as "immunity against bankruptcy due to X", X being the insurance case. That's what you buy.
Figuring out how to best allocate the money is up to the insurance - it's their money, after all.
Well, it's not your money. You're gambling with them, your bet is that you'll get sick or have an accident within X period of time, they're gambling that you won't. At the same time, to uphold your gamble, you have to do everything any sane person would do to avoid illness or accidents.
You pay the ante up-front, just like on gambling tables, that's no longer your money. You're down that money.
But, if your gamble gets an out, you get payed big time. Hopefully in the form of them covering a portion or a totality of your healthcare expenses. It's a big dangerous casino, and as usual, the house always has the edge.
Except some people don’t get paid big time. A lot of people actually. Because they like to waste all the ante’d money on stuff like these stupid ads.
Except the casino can refuse to pay out for any reason at all
Naming it gambling and then having it required by the government to operate a vehicle seems like a bad analogy.
I know, but that's what literally it is. It's even the historical origin of insurance as a concept. If you win, they have to pay your liabilities, if insurance wins, that means there hasn't been any major accident or harm done. Either way, for the government, it's a win-win. Either all it's fine, or someone is ready to pay up the costs. The problem is, of course, scummy insurers who refuse to pony up their end of the bargain because they blew the money on ads, cocaine and hookers.
One reason insurance ads are so stupid is that they are tightly regulated as to what they can actually say. They’re not allowed to make big promises. So you get lizards talking to car tires or whatever the fuck.
Before choosing your insurance provider, google the company and "combined ratio". Anything over 100 and they are paying out more than they are making. Investors want to see a combined ratio in the mid 90s, so if you are not an investor maybe you want the ones with high CR? Or they might be wasting it I guess, but either way less savvy I suppose.
Advertising. They make it seem like the best thing since sliced bread so if someone is considering changing providers, that company comes to mind. The more they repeat it the more likely people are to think of it when considering options. It doesn't work on everyone, but this tactic has enough supporting data for them to keep dumping money into it.
To answer your question about why they are allowed to do it, I would imagine there are little to no regulations on how much is spent on advertising campaigns. It all depends on what a business can afford to spend. Since insurance companies are all about denying coverage, I'd imagine they have quite a bit to dump into advertising. I haven't looked into it that much, but it looks like they can also claim these as business expenses and get tax write-offs. It wouldn't be surprising if they tacked on other expenses to the advertising budget and claimed those as write-offs as well.
Why do you think getting insurance to actually pay out is so difficult?
It shouldn't be, but enough people are either ignorant that it's a racket or they profit somehow by it that nobody says anything, or they'll call you a damned commie if you openly question powerful people like that
Their primary goal is to make profit for investors. They kind of also sometimes help people.
They kind of also pay out on the services you pay them for, it's not helping, it's just an obligation they haven't managed to dodge.
It's almost like there should be a not for profit option, perhaps if there were some large group of people who worked for everyone, and we're controlled by some sort of elected governing body.
Billions? Trillions? Ummmm, anyway...
The reason is because they aren't idiots, it works or they wouldn't do it. The issue with car insurance (and I assume this is what you are talking about since they bombard me also) is that it is a commodity. Let's face it, they are all the same and heavily regulated by states. The only way they can grab customers is by the "plant our name in your head" method and that requires yelling at you constantly.
That said I HATE those ads. Geico has now been replace by Liberty Mutual as the most annoying company.
The question wasn't why do they try, the question was why does society let them do it