Submitted by Mary Bottari on December 21, 2010 - 13:00
Today’s Wall Street Journalhas a stunning expose on a publicly-traded company called Life Partners Holdings. Are you ready for this? Life Partners creeps around asking the unemployed, the elderly and the sick (especially people with HIV/AIDS) to sell them their life insurance policies for cash. Then they bundle these policies into securities and sell them to vultures – oh, I am sorry, “investors.” Then the “investors” sit around and wait for people to die – the sooner the better for the purchasers of these death bonds. The future of this industry “looks bright,” chirps National Underwriters.
Reminds you a little of those Death Eaters in Harry Potter, doesn’t it?
Of course the “life settlements industry” would not be possible with out the financing and backing of big Wall Street banks, the triple-A rating from Wall Street credit agencies and, of course, the quality work of the “big four” accounting firms. The recently-indicted Ernst and Young cooks the books for Life Partners. Last year BanksterUSA targeted Goldman Sachs’ financing of this emerging industry. This year, Goldman shut down Longmore Capital, its death bonds subsidiary, and withdrew from the market…
“This is a disgusting and ghoulish way to make money” ~ Mark Wiley
What are the Mises Communities thoughts?
This is a disgusting and ghoulish way to make money.
This is a disgusting and ghoulish way to make money.
This is a disgusting and ghoulish way to make money.
People voluntarily sell their life insurance policies in exchange for cash that they need at the present moment, meaning they somehow come out better than before, or else they wouldn’t have made the - I’ll say it again - voluntary exchange.
I don’t think you need a Patronus Charm to keep from sucking out your soul, so… no.
Weren’t you supposed to debate Sieben on something a while back?
If you think about it, it actually removes the incentive to kill yourself to get the money sooner. It increases the amount of money old people have now, so they can use it to buy better care and enhance their quality of life.
You are. Because you have to. Because the only way that you think the free market can fail is in really extreme situations.
Competition between brokers. You’re making it sound like this is “free money”. The market price of free money is very high.
You could probably also protect them without attacking travelling merchants. Go start a “protect the old people from being extorted by capitalists club”, where you bind the signateurs to give up their rights to attorney if they are diagnosed with alzheimers.
Be creative. Think for 10 seconds. The answer to every problem is not “shoot people”.
Someone immediately close to me died recently to cancer. Chemo visits cost any where from 10-20k per visit. Roughly $6000 per 8oz bag of liquid, where less then 10% of the bag is actual medicine.
Would you mind PMing me with more information about this?
I don’t know specifics, but, if you’re researching for a paper or anything, I’d call a few local oncologists/hospitals and ask about the specifics government licenses needed to perform these operations (including doctors, manufacturers of the chemicals, etc.).
