Hacker News Reader

Comment by drunkenmagician | Hacker News Reader

Call me cynical, but anytime an insurance company decides its in everyone's 'best interest', and by everyone I mean the policy holders, I cannot help but translate to mean - 'Its costing us more money that we expected, so we don't want to cover this'

View on HN

Well insurance companies account for this by raising premiums. In fact it sounds counterintuitive but something which happens often is more profitable for insurance companies because otherwise few people bother to take out policies for it.

In this specific case, I imagine the reason for the announcement wasn't moral or financial – the company likely decided it did not want the legal liability of potentially funding international terrorism.

Case in point companies unwillingness to buy pandemic insurance before Covid hit. Maybe lucky for insurers, and obviously they refused to sell after.

I have things to say on (French) AXA. Worst insurer I ever had the displeasure to deal with. I will spare you the multi-year history, but if you're an expat: AXA will pretend that once you move out, suddenly all 'modern' financial infrastructure has evaporated and only French cheques exist (not cache-able anywhere in my next country, Netherlands) when refunding the fines and erroneously incurred 'costs'.

They'll will string you along for _years_ correcting their own mistakes and then you're stuck with a bunch of useless cheques. I think half a dozen former colleagues and friends tried to help me out too, including someones grandma, to no avail whatsoever.

Really, the worst.

I used to work for AXA Health insurance.

Up until about 2017(!), they were reimbursing people for treatment which was claimed back (as opposed to billed to the insurance company directly) by cheque exclusively, and there were rumours from the finance department that this was because lots of people never bothered to cash in their cheques because of the hassle compared to receiving a direct debit.

It's a large company: these things are not accidental (was home insurance btw). I know French law enforces cheques validity as legal tender, but it's a supremely asshole move to give them out to foreigners/people abroad. They did mail them abroad to me in the end! This is where someone's grandmother came in, but she couldn't cash them either, even with a letter authorising her. Out of all the countries I've lived in Europe, France is the only one where I ever saw cheques in actual usage!

In NL, cheques went out of fashion in the 80ies, and banks haven't had the infrastructure to process them for decades now.

You're completely right in thinking that. Insurance companies are only providing "insurance" from the perspective of the customers. They're actually just another investment vehicle and their managers (not so dissimilar to hedge and mutual funds) optimise for profits -- thus minimising risk. All the while being "risky" enough to allow for building some customer base (so cash inflow).

That's not cynical. That's just the lowbrow understanding of motivations. In that sense, any time you do something, you are only doing that because the utility to you is lowered. Sure, but that model provides no useful predictions about reality.

Everyone on the Internet always acts like this is some great revelation: "they're only stopping it because it doesn't provide enough utility to them"

Duh, that's what utility is. Honestly, it's so repetitive and each time it's presented as some insight when it's so trivial it provides no new value.

Not cynical at all. Insurance business is mostly predatory. If it doesn't make them money, they're not gonna cover it.

Regardless, in this specific instance I'm all for it. This will hopefully wake enterprises up so that they invest in good IT practices, which will have lasting effect on other parts of IT within firms.

This isn’t predatory at all. This is a company creating a risk pool that is cheaper for organizations that believe they can self-manage ransomware risks. The ethical behaviour of an insurance company is completely orthogonal to what risks they choose to cover.

Predatory in the same sense that most businesses are predatory. I.e exist to make a profit.

I think of insurance as the only pyramid scheme allowed by the governments across the world. The only legal pyramid scheme.

You already so many MLM companies, why would you think that it is the only one? Also, insurance edge risks. Πhat's why you take it. A better way is a mutual (is that the english word?), but it is too much communism for America!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com