CARLTON FLETCHER: Those insurance guys, theyre a laugh riot

Dying to me don’t seem like all that much fun.

— John Mellencamp

True story.

I got a letter in the mail the other day from my insurance company. I won’t say which one right now; suffice it to say it’s one whose name you’d know.

There was a bit of mumbo-jumbo and jibber-jabber, but the gist of the letter was simple: If I keep paying my life insurance premiums over the next eight years at the agreed-upon rate (not that I had any kind of choice in that bit of business, but that’s another story), I can expect the premiums to remain relatively the same. At the end of that eight years, though, the premiums will bump up a bit. To just shy of $25,000 a month!

I’ll let that sink in … $25,000 a month!

I could have reacted to that letter in any number of ways — righteous indignation, outrage, resignation, confusion. But here’s what I actually did. I laughed. Out loud. Uproariously.

Let me point out here that there’s absolutely nothing funny about getting screwed over by an insurance company. An industry that was dreamed into existence by people who, taking notes from the Mafia, I would guess, were willing to bet that you would do everything you can to stay healthy and not wreck your car and not have anyone steal your stuff and life was a pretty good idea at the time. You played the odds and bet against yourself in those categories, paying the insurance companies as a hedge against any of the aforementioned calamities.

But somewhere along the way, the insurance companies decided unilaterally that, heck, why don’t we deny every claim that comes in and see what happens? And their profits skyrocketed. Emboldened, they paid a few friendly politicians and encouraged them to pass laws requiring insurance of everyone who wanted to work, drive, own a house or live, and suddenly they were golden. Their millions turned into billions and the billions into trillions and suddenly the Mafia was coming to the insurance industry, asking for advice.

Of course, politicians being politicians, they didn’t want the electorate to figure out that they were in bed with the insurance boys, so they created positions like “insurance commissioner” to make sure people didn’t get letters saying their premiums would increase to $25,000 a month at some random point in time. But the politicians forgot to tell these elected overseers that they were supposed to be looking out for the people, not the insurance companies.

I guess when your bottom line reads in the billions and trillions, you just need to spread a little more of the cheddar around to make sure you’ve got friends looking over your shoulder instead of someone who would actually hold you to some standard of decency.

So we, being the fine little sheep that we are, just sigh and accept it when some insurance company tells us they’re going to drop us for having the audacity to file a claim or they increase our premiums by, oh … 200,000 percent. (I wonder, incidentally, what formula they used to come up with that amount.) And when they send us notification, we just laugh at the absurdity of it.

I’m working on a plan, though, that will allow me to have the last laugh. I’ll continue to pay these vampires — who suck money rather than blood — the already outlandish premiums — too much invested now — every month, just as I’ve done for years. And before they have the opportunity to cancel the policy in eight years — which is what they’re doing, because I have about as much chance of having $25,000 a month to throw away on life insurance premiums as I have of becoming People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” (see photo) — I’ll kick the bucket. Hopefully, it’ll be at seven years, 364 days.

I don’t expect many of you to show up for the funeral, but you’ll at least get it that I went out with the knowledge that I kinda beat the bastards at their own game.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].