I am in a particularly hateful state about insurance. My brother is an insurance broker in another state. My other brother is a right wing cuck who thinks capitalism makes everything the greatest it could be (trumper too, btw). My wife has worked all her life to pay into all the things and last April she suddenly lost her vision and her job and her shitty doctor didnt know how to treat her vertigo for seven years and fucking told her that only Jesus can fix her and now she’s fucked, broke, and today is asking me if I want a divorce so I wont be responsible for her debts or suicide.

If any if you fucking MAGA shitheads are reading this: you’re goddamn right America is a shitty country and you fucking assholes are the reason why.

Car insurance ads are bad, but health insurance ads are worse. Every time I see one I wonder whose treatment got denied to pay for it.

Advertising. They make it seem like the best thing since sliced bread so if someone is considering changing providers, that company comes to mind. The more they repeat it the more likely people are to think of it when considering options. It doesn’t work on everyone, but this tactic has enough supporting data for them to keep dumping money into it.

To answer your question about why they are allowed to do it, I would imagine there are little to no regulations on how much is spent on advertising campaigns. It all depends on what a business can afford to spend. Since insurance companies are all about denying coverage, I’d imagine they have quite a bit to dump into advertising.

That’s why I purchase a plan from a company that doesn’t advertise.

Why is it apparently cool and fine for insurance companies to spend countless billions, trillions of our money constantly buying ad time?

It’s not your money, it’s their money.

What, are you just gonna not have insurance? Something could go wrong! You don’t wanna go bankrupt because of a health problem, do you? Also, we can’t guarantee you won’t still go bankrupt with our insurance, but you won’t have to pay for basic drugs! Maybe…

Not sure what the issue is here, but this may be a US-centric problem…?

Here in Australia, insurance companies are required to demonstrate sufficient means to cover the risk they carry on their books. We have a government body (APRA) that regulates and routinely audits this (along with other requirements).

What the company spends on coffee, furniture or marketing has no bearing on this - those are expenses for them to manage after they satisfy the above requirements.

This is one of a thousand reasons why the entire insurance industry should be burnt to the ground

If you’re in the USA I would suggest using Amica for your insurance. They are great, and I’ve never seen an advertisement for them!

Because you don’t make the rules and they do.

It’s not, that’s wby it only occur in USA

Because… that’s how advertising works?

a petition to ban marketing, advertising, and sale of personal information in general would be a good way to have a chance at shattering big tech and commercial crap all at once, but it’ll never happen 🙁

Before choosing your insurance provider, google the company and “combined ratio”. Anything over 100 and they are paying out more than they are making. Investors want to see a combined ratio in the mid 90s, so if you are not an investor maybe you want the ones with high CR? Or they might be wasting it I guess, but either way less savvy I suppose.

Let’s put aside the many, many problems of insurance companies in reality and talk in terms of two parties acting in good faith for ease of demonstration.

Let’s take random person Alice who has insured her wrench set at Insurance Company X. Her wrench set is very important to her job and she only believes in high quality tools, so it is quite expensive. So expensive, that if something were to happen to it, she might not be able to replace it right away. Instead, she pays Company X for an insurance policy. Alice can afford to pay a little bit every month and so this is a good set up.

Uh oh, an impromptu stomp band raided Alice’s store and appropriated her wrenches as drumsticks. They’re ruined! Luckily, Alice is insured and Insurance Company X pays her for replacement wrenches.

Unfortunately for Company X, Alice needed new wrenches before her monthly payments would exceeded the price of the wrenches. So how did they have the money? Well, they have more customers than just Alice. They use some of the money that they get from others to help buy the wrench set in the same way some of Alice’s money is used with other problems as a way to socialize the losses.

As you might guess, this requires more people. More people contributing at once means a bigger pool of money that can cover bigger individual losses when the time comes. As such, Insurance Company X uses a portion of the money they get to recruit more users and thereby make their system work better.

But also greed. Lots and lots of greed.