The insurance scam

The insurance industry commenced in the dingy back room of a coffee shop in the east end of London approximately three hundred years ago, on the back of the slaving industry. A group of English opportunists decided to exploit the fear of cargo loss experienced by the British slavers as they crossed the Atlantic with their human currency. In fact the first recorded case of ‘insurance fraud’ occurred in 1767 when one of their insured clients threw his cargo overboard and subsequently filed a claim alleging stormy weather. Unfortunately for the individual concerned, there just happened to be another merchant ship in the adjacent shipping lane, whose captain confirmed the weather conditions had been perfect that day. A perfect example of being in the wrong lane at the worst time.

America ostensibly gained its independence from the tyranny of Britain in 1783 after a fiercely and valiantly fought guerilla war. The continental army outmaneuvered the blinkered battlefield tactics of an outdated British command, which still had its head buried in the formalities of European style warfare. King George had to eventually admit that the rag tag band of colonialists succeeded in humiliating the then global superpower. However the English are a wily people with a long and admittedly impressive history of not only never suffering an invasion of their precious little island, but somewhat unbelievably conquering most parts of the globe. This ability to tenaciously hold onto power and punch way above their geopolitical weight is part of the explanation as to why they still indirectly control the world and America with their sinister creation of insurance.

All insurance policies lead back to Lloyds of London where insurance executives get paid millions of dollars for fostering a culture of fear. The insurance brokers effectively create a climate of doom and destruction in which should an individual lose everything to an act of God they will be there with their adjusters and check books to smooth over the anguish and discontent. That is the promise anyway. The unfortunate and unfailingly predictable truth however is that they will find every excuse to deny financial support for even the most drastic of calamities. To understand how this group of English opportunists plotted their course to this position of seemingly unassailable power requires a brief recitation of the historically relevant events since the idea of fear mongering took cover behind the respectable cloak of disaster paternalism.

When the British got ignominiously thrown out of one of their largest colonies they cleverly populated the newly found America with spies and were able to financially corrupt colonialists who still harbored sympathies for the crown. They were given instructions to widely promote the value of purchasing insurance policies to protect their hard won new territories from unforeseen calamities. The Americans that chose to ignore this ‘valuable’ advice soon found their houses, farms and other properties mysteriously ablaze in the middle of the night and not surprisingly the next day they received a visit from their concerned insurance broker at which point they willingly signed the contract and dutifully paid their insurance premium.

After several decades of this diplomatic enforcement the British had secured their foothold in America and they began scheming to extend their radius of control, which with America being a land of laws, meant they had to permanently insert themselves into the legislative process. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, after the failed 1812 campaign by the British to reclaim America, the then Prime Minister, John Russell, instructed his emissaries to insinuate themselves into the lobbying process in Washington DC with the sole purpose of promoting legislation that mandated the purchasing of insurance policies. Slowly but decidedly surely, more and more laws appeared on both the federal and state books making it illegal to not have insurance for what seemed an endless list of products and services with off course a significant percentage of the money finding its way back to Lloyds of London.

There was no way the unsuspecting Americans could have known about this surreptious channeling of money and power back to their previous persecutors, but the British, to their credit and ill intentioned discretion, convincingly kept up the façade with their polite manners and clipped tones. The arrival of the first world and the defense of their empire strained the national coffers and naturally Prime Minister Asquith decided to develop more sophisticated tools to plunder the pockets of Americans with inflated insurance policies. There was nothing, in his opinion, that did not deserve the ‘protection’ that Lloyds of London could provide. Asquith gave a series of speeches describing the terrors that the world now faced and what better way to prepare for the worst than securing ones future with insurance. The level to which he took the exploitation of fear was unprecedented and almost too convenient in the context of a world war.

The Second World War continued this theme of snake oil protection, and then came along the booming auto industry, which just begged for more of the same abuse, and by this point the insurance industry had become the de-facto British Empire. Following on from the car business the next victim was the American healthcare system, which provided an infinitesimal list of unpredictabilities. Admittedly the British received immense support from the armies of litigation lawyers, who for their own self-serving interests fuelled the culture of fear.