The increase in my house insurance reminds me that when people put in false claims or otherwise defraud an insurance company, they justify their actions by saying it doesn’t hurt anyone; it’s just an insurance company.
What such larcenous folk don’t realize is that an insurance company will NEVER lose. If they do lose more than they have accounted for in any given year, they simply jack up the price for those who faithfully pay their premiums without ever submitting a claim, or they get the government to bail them out. Which means, everyone but the insurance company loses.
Not that I think there is any shenanigans going on with the insurance company when they raised my rates, at least not more than usual, but it is something I think about, especially now that I am getting older and don’t have a lot of resources. It makes me wonder about what I will do if I ever get to the point of needing a nursing home. Would I discontinue the insurance those last years, and deal with whatever comes? After all, it will be the nursing home that gets my property, and I could use the insurance payment for one last fling.
Meantime, the sun is shining in this hiatus before the next storm hits, I have library books to read, and a roof over my head. And that, too, is an insurance of a kind. It might not be the monetary kind of insurance, but those things do help to ensure a good day! (I’m stretching things a bit here, since ensure and insure are completely different things, but I wanted to leave here with more positive slant.)
I hope you’re having a good day, or at least, as good a day as possible.
***
If you haven’t yet read A Spark of Heavenly Fire, my novel of a quarantine that predated this pandemic by more than ten years, you can read the first chapter online here: http://patbertram.com/A_Spark_of_Heavenly_Fire.html
Buy it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024FB5H6/
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Bertram's Blog 
January 22, 2021 at 1:45 pm
Today hasn’t been so bad. I got some important work done on my checklist before I move into a bigger apartment, and I’m very excited. And the sun is shining here as well, and The Sun showed up in my Tarot reading today when I asked how next week will go for me. Not a bad Friday, all told.
January 22, 2021 at 10:44 pm
So, a couple of thoughts…
The legal fiction of a company or corporation as a person is just that, a fiction. The fiction works, functionally, for a lot of reasons. One way in which it definitely (IMHO) doesn’t work though, is in viewing the fiction as a singular living, breathing, thinking human being. It may or may not be controlled in some sense, by a single human, from time to time, but it definitely isn’t a human. It’s a mistake to expect the fiction to behave as a singular human would. It’s a collection of real humans; policy holders, employees, etc. The real humans suffer. The legal fiction never will.
I want to ensure a given risk is less likely to inflict itself upon me, to the extent I can. Clear brush in a fire prone area. Know what floods in the spring look like. Don’t drive if you’ve had a few. That sort of thing. I also insure myself. Knowing that stuff happens, I save few bucks for when the water heater blows, or have a generator (or warm socks) for when the power goes out. I’ve bought insurance for those things I can’t mitigate, but I wonder if I should. Maybe if the time comes I need it, it won’t be there anyway.
In the meantime, it’s nice here too. A few flurries overnight, then a walk…
January 23, 2021 at 7:20 pm
Insurance is an interesting psychological concept. A lot of people tend to think insurance is also ensurance — that if they have insurance, it prevents bad things from happening. For most of my life, I didn’t have health insurance — I figured it was better to eat healthy foods, take supplements, and exercise to keep from getting sick. Mostly, though, it irritated me that my health insurance would have been three times what Jeff’s was just because I was a woman. They said it was because women had babies, but even though I never have a baby, they wouldn’t take that into consideration because they needed my money to pay for the women who were having babies. I thought that was utterly nuts and totally unfair.