Is Insurance a "Hoax"?
It's not the type of reportage you expect from a business magazine, but Bloomberg Markets' cover story for this month has this rather brazen headline: "The Insurance Hoax: Property insurers use secret tactics to cheat customers out of payments--as profits break records."
You might expect such a provocative headline from a left-leaning magazine like, say, The Nation or Harper's.
Indeed, the head of the Insurance Information Institute, Robert Hartwig, promptly wrote a long missive to the editor, taking issue with the story's tone and lambasting the authors' basic math skills.
"The malicious nature of this story is shocking ... I find it baffling that a sophisticated business-oriented magazine that is part of one of the most respected names in business information services chose to publish such a biased inaccurate and intellectually shabby story," Hartwig wrote.
Instead of rehashing the original story and the III's point-by-point refutation of it, I'll just leave you with links to both so you can decide for yourself: shoddy journalism or shady industry?
Comments
I wonder why all insurance companies and salesman are lumped together. There are probably good ones and bad ones, just like any other industry. i do think though, as a company gets bigger, and decision makers get more removed from the customers, ethics are bent more than when people are dealing directly with each other.
Posted by: lori | September 6, 2007 10:49 PM
While I believe there is some truth to what the writers have said, I resent the implication that the insurance industry is totally morally impaired.
Posted by: Willard R. Brumbaugh | September 7, 2007 12:33 PM