Transparency in Insurance (Edit: Solution found)
EDIT: shminux has found a tool that instantly delivers term life insurance quotes. Most everything I’ve written below is now irrelevant and can now be ignored.
Here is what seems to be the standard for acquiring insurance (of most kinds, though here I’ll be focusing on life insurance):
1. You contact a salesperson (agent) who is incentivized to sell you insurance policies which earn them more money.
2. You provide a basic set of data regarding your health and general medical status.
3. The agent takes this information and <MYSTERIOUS BLACK BOX HERE>, and then sends you the quote.
You don’t know how this quote was generated exactly. Presumably actuarial tables were involved at some point. Maybe it was marked up or down based on how confident you sounded to the agent. Or the agent divined the quote based on tea leaves.
And if you want to comparison shop—you’ll have to go to other agents, fill out more forms containing the same information over and over. Even getting quotes on different plans _from the same company_ often requires specifically requesting each one through an agent.
This is insane.
If there exists a way to easily get many life insurance quotes at once, please tell me about it. If the general algorithms to generate these plans are well known, please link to a thorough description or implementation so at least people have a means of determining whether or not they’re being ripped off.
But if those things truly do not exist—I think we should fix this system.
Crowdsourcing the acquisition and publication of life insurance rates could go a long way towards bringing some transparency to what seems to be a very, very broken marketplace.
So this is what I propose. If we systematically divide up the work of getting quotes, I think we can amass a considerable amount of data fairly quickly.
(This should obviously be of particular interest to would-be test-subject/cryonics-enthusiasts.)
Does this sound feasible? Does this information already exist in a form which renders this data raid unnecessary? Can it be improved?
Even better: you can’t get the exact text of a policy until you buy it. Some homeowners or renters policies will actually insure you against libel claims. But I couldn’t find a single insurance company willing to give me the exact text of the policy until I actually bought one.
Now that is truly a scandal.
A quick search turns up a number of independent life insurance brokers. For example, this one operates in MA.
Also, some actuarial tables are already online.
That’s quite interesting. I went through for one long-term life insurance, got a quote of $1200 a year for $500k payout; then I went through the health, and apparently because my father is ailing and I checked the ‘has used nicotine gum’ option, the premium triples!
Thank you—I failed to find these (possibly due to a lack of terminology knowledge on my part), but these tools look fantastic and exactly what I wanted to see.
Uhhh… Do you mind removing the unnecessary flattery from your OP edit?
Apologies. Is done.
The insurance companies are playing a form of iterated prisoner’s dilemma against each other. If one company made itself highly transparent, it would gain business at the expense of all the opaque companies; but the opaque companies would follow suit, leading to a new equilibrium in which the industry as a whole made less money, but apportioned in the same way. Additionally, disclosing the contents of their price-setting black boxes would make it easier for new companies to construct similar boxes, and become competition.
This is a standard way for a (new) wireless carrier to try to set itself apart from the incumbent confusopolies. Of course, once entrenched, they stop defecting.
It’s not insane. It’s a cleverly designed system from which the insurance company that set up the system profits.
That sounds like an implausible amount of coordination amongst insurance companies, especially on the level of agents.
I suspect at this point it’s mostly inertia acting functionally like a cabal. There was a time when the best way to get a quote would have been to talk to an agent who would then do COMPLICATED MATH you could not comprehend and return a number to you. This is no longer the case, but apparently no one thought it would be profitable or worthwhile to go all-transparent or make insurers’ methods and rates public. So we keep doing it the old way.
That’s why I suspect the consumer side is the place to fix this. We have the means to acquire and publish the data, but it requires a certain level of time investment and coordination.
Every single company profits from making it hard to compare their prices against the competition.
Additionally big corporations are good at coordinating. Big Banks seem to be engaged in such illegal coopertion on a daily basis.
True; it’s insane that no one’s done the relatively small amount of work it should take to fix this.
One time I tried to get life insurance, and they required a saliva sample, and they would not produce a complete list of what it was for—I could get a partial list, and the salesperson would rule out some things that he thought I was worried about, but I wasn’t allowed to know all the things they were going to do with it. I wound up going with a different company that required blood but would at least tell me what they were going to do with it.
What were they going to do with it?
From past experience working in insurance companies, my first guess would be:
Creating clones and spreading them throughout the multiverse to run a battery of tests for risk-susceptibility in a spacetime isolation bubble, and then producing a premium inversely proportional to the expected life-profitability of the clones studied. With typos in the stats and compound rounding errors (always rounding upwards).
That sounds fair enough; as long as the premiums are accurate.
You know, I don’t even remember? There was nothing remotely plausible that I was going to object to. I just objected on principle to not being told.
Why would a person without dependents even consider life insurance, except for cryonics?
Beats me. I got it for cryo.
Life insurance policies that grow in value (IIRC: whole life) have favorable tax treatment in the US because the growth in value is not taxed—put the same amount in a savings account and the interest would be taxed as income.
There are also estate planning benefits, but those seem pointless without dependents.
True, although the wasted life insurance portion hardly compensates for it (see Buy term and invest the difference). There is also the usual Roth IRA route for tax-free savings for retirement.
Perhaps they believe current low interest rates are permanent and life insurance companies are systematically offering too high implicit rates of return? Off the top of my head.
Life insurance is cheaper if you get it when you’re young and healthy, so it might make sense to have it before you actually get dependents, if you plan on having them.
That sounds like a myth concocted by insurance agents. If you count all the extra payments made before you actually start needing life insurance, the modest rise in premiums does not compensate for all the money wasted by such a “prepayment”.
Cheaper by enough to make up for the extra years you pay premiums in? E. g. getting life insurance at 25 will have cost less than getting life insurance at 40 by the time you are 60? If so, why would insurance companies set the rates that way? Are people who get life insurance early so much more responsible that they are significantly less likely to die even at higher ages?
Maybe they are; I’ve heard horror stories about getting life insurance (like OP, come to think of it...) and who but a very responsible long-term thinking young person would actually get it? I’d happily bet that they are more likely to live a long time than a randomly selected young person.
I’m a long-term thinking young person! I’m under 30, have long-term savings and good credit and a steady job and no debt and I don’t understand why there isn’t competition for what is statistically free money I am giving away.
Well, it’s only free money if we assume the industry is pathological enough that no one has been going after young people and driving down premiums.
Or that the industry thinks anyone who’s young and buying life insurance knows something that they’re not letting on.
Adverse selection is a problem for all kinds of insurance, so I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain a bias against the young in particular.
Insider’s tip: It is.
Justification: There aren’t enough studies and samples of these populations (long-term-thinking-young-persons-buying-full-permanent-insurance) for them to already have a clear picture of just how much lower the premium should be, and the market here doesn’t appear (to them at least) large (and/or gullible) enough for the infogathering investment to be worth the potential profits.
Thus, some “underwriter” somewhere (probably at the notice of the automated quoting system in use, though) is just going by some “X% off” rule that a bunch of business-people agreed was a good Schelling point (without knowing that it was) at some point in Z Insurance Company’s history, and giving you a premium based on that.
Does this imply that the best strategy for “long-term-thinking-young-persons-buying-full-permanent-insurance” (henceforth LOTTYPEBFULPIN) is to actually purchase short-term insurance until they’re part of a more competitive market?
That’s if you assume a bunch of other things, like there being a sufficient amount of LOTTYPEBFULPIN for it to actually influence the market or “the market” considering them to be a profitable demographic.
The best strategy, up here where I live, is clearly to get very-short-term insurance (no longer than one year at a time) and accumulate reserve capital, preferably in an interest-aggregating form such as stable bonds or special “stable fund” accounts that can be pulled back into money whenever there’s an issue. As the reserve goes up, the amount you need to insure and the various conditions of your insurance can get less and less wide-covering, until eventually you have a sufficient “long-term-thinking-reserve-capital-pool” to not only self-insure, but to also serve as a partial early retirement fund (assuming you don’t need to dip into it too much ’til then). The more lucky or enterprising will even end up making enough money from interests as the pool accrues and grows to stop pooling and consider the interest a secondary salary.
Of course, for that you have to be extremely patient and either forego a lot of costly young-person-activities or have a revenue higher than your lifestyle.
Very cool. I’m adding “write post with pretty graph about optimal insurance strategies” to my implausibly optimistic list of projects to get to.