If you’re not paying attention to the "skim, scam and fraud’ you’re getting cheated.
intercst
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The Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890, we’ve been here before.
Well, 15 seconds into the video they have a chart showing how much insurance rates have increased since January 2020.
Adjusted for inflation, home insurance has remained steady and car insurance has decreased.
DB2
Last 30 years:
From 1994 to 2024, total premiums increased 342% and worker contributions rose 308%, researchers found. During the same period, worker earnings grew only about 120%.
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Premiums were were still way too high in 2020.
My favorite part of the video is that 10% of your premium goes to the administrative and legal apparatus designed to cheat you out of the coverage you paid for when you make a claim.
intercst
2 Likes
I have no way to know if their figures are accurate given that they couldn’t even handle inflation.
That said, every company has general administrative overhead. Is 10% “too much”? For example Costco, in a very competitive industry, has SG&A expenses that are 9% of revenues ($26.7B/$293B).
DB2
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The overall overhead rate on all forms of personal insurance is 45%, some are less, some more.
But of that 45%, 10% pays for the “claims adjusting” operation that focuses on cheating you out of the coverage you paid for.
I recently found an amazing tidbit of information on my Medigap plan.
Of course, I already knew that Medigap insurers literally do nothing for the 20% average “skim rate” they collect from policyholders. When I called the Washington State Insurance Commissioners office in the months before I turned age 65 for information on consumer complaints for the Medigap insurers that operate in the state, The analyst said, "We get very few complaints on Medigap, because there’s not much a Medigap insurer can do to cause you to complain. All the benefit administration and accounting is done by CMS, and they tell the Medigap insurer how much to pay. About the only time we receive a complaint is when a customer cancels a policy and the insurer is slow in stopping the automatic debit from the customers checking account for the monthly premium.
As a result, you can safely choose the company with the lowerst premium – they’re all the same."
Last month I got a letter from my Medigap insurer informing me that they were not going to debit my checking account for the premium payment this month because they had run afoul of the “minimum Medical Loss Ratio” requirements enforced by CMS. That’s an MLR of 65%, a 35% skim rate.
{{ Under federal law, the minimum required medical loss ratio (MLR)—sometimes referred to as the minimum loss ratio or NLR—for Medigap (Medicare Supplement) plans is 65% for individual policies and 75% for group policies. This means insurers must spend at least that percentage of premium revenues on direct medical claims and quality improvement rather than administrative costs or profits, or issue a refund. [1, 2, [3](Medigap Reform Legislation of 1990: A 10-Year Review - PMC] }}
Now, I have the insurer with the lowest premium offered in the state. How much are the insurers charging much higher premiums screwing their customers out of?
Medigap should be just a box you check on the Gov’t website, when you sign up for Medicare since the Gov’t is already doing all the work for you. It’s outright theft that the bipartisan culture of corruption in Washington is allowing a for-profit insurer to collect a 20% to 35% toll on work your taxpayer dollars are already funding.
It’s very easy to retire early merely off of the amount of “skim, scam and fraud” in daily life, if you keep your eyes open and take steps to protect yourself.
intercst
7 Likes
From Medicare dot gov:
If you have a Medigap policy and get care, Medicare will pay its share of the Medicare-approved amount for covered health care costs. In most Medigap policies, you agree to have the Medigap insurance company get your Part B claim information directly from Medicare. Then, your Medigap policy will pay your doctor whatever amount you owe under your policy and you’re responsible for any costs that are left.
The benefits in each lettered plan are the same, no matter which insurance company sells it. The price is the only difference between policies with the same plan letter sold by different companies. There can be big differences in the premiums that different insurance companies charge for the same coverage, so be sure you compare Medigap plans with the same letter (for example, compare Plan G from one company with Plan G from another company).
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And then we have State Farm sending money back to policy holders as a dividend.
It’s a small fraction of the premium, of course. $83.xx and 44.xx payable in September…
(I recieved 83