A second irony is that neither of these products is nearly as malevolent as Ames like to say they are. The insurance was predominantly a tax play with little or no insurance element. In fact, each employee who died was one lest tree in the tax-avoidance orchard, so, on balance, companies gained on the policies if the employees lived.

Life settlements “bets” are not much different from what annuity issuers and large pension funds do: if the annuitant lives, the issuer loses. But no one complains about that.

But it does make little sense for a pension fund to buy a “death bond.” That sort of investment doubles down on the fund’s risk that healthcare improvements will extend lives. Much better for a pension fund to buy stock in life insurers with little annuity exposure, if they can find one.

I agree that life settlements will raise the cost of life insurance, but I think Ames would go crazy if he knew why. It’s because life insurance companies take into account in their pricing the fact that some policies will lapse or be surrendered when a life settlement would yield more money. Actuarially, that’s the same thing as making a gift to the insurance company. So the reason insurers will have to raise rates if life settlements increase is that they will no longer be able to profit on the stupidity of their customers. Pick your poison, Mr. Ames: death bonds, or lapse-based pricing. A veritable Scylla and Charybdis for the chronically splenetic.

Eventually, I suspect that insurance companies will remove the middleman and find a way to offer actuarially adjusted cash surrenders to their own clients. And that will be the end of that. (But it won’t happen while lapses and ill-advised surrenders remain a meaningful source of profit.)

Time to wake up

Your piece is written from the left bias.
This is a shame as you are missing the other side of the equation.

Mandatory medication under nationalized health care that can be laced to create the early demise.
Nationalized health care will bring the necessity to ration of health care which will decrease the life expectancy.
Yearly flu shots will bring on early dementia and Alzheimer’s creating a new problem that can only be solved by euthanasia (increased profit).

What you are also not considering is that the left/right, progressive/conservative, Soros/Buffet are two sides of the same enterprise.
are two sides of the NWO coin.

Fascist, Communist, or some new Tyrannical dictatorship is the order!

I may be retarded because I don’t understand the reasoning and failure of socialists to listen.