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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

The buyer is essentially making a financial bet that pays out if a stranger will die before a certain date. Even if it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, that aspect feels very morbid to me.

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Isn't this the same as most pension plans and annuities?

Yes, but with something like a pension plan you're pretty much always dealing with a pool of people on both sides of the transaction. In the situation in the article you can have a single person on each side so a particular individual is making a financial bet on another specific individual dying sooner rather than later.

I think the key problem is that it creates an incentive for the hopeful buyer to see if they can’t hurry the process up some.

I would imagine that if the death is even remotely suspicious, the beneficiary is going to be murder suspect #1.

It's not murder to bully someone but it can shorten their life.

There are legal ways to get around it. The viager system is a plot device in this short story by Guy de Maupassant: https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/shor...

So then the brokers are the serial killers like with life insurance agents, because the surviving spouse always gets convicted!

actually, because they always get convicted I don't have any proof that the brokers are serial killers

I just dont have any faith in how district attorneys and prosecutors work anymore

which is the plot of this movie https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Viager

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