The barely readable missive below arrived this morning in response to, well, the young woman concerned has been running a campaign including a petition over what she calls discrimination against people who are mentally ill. Yes Dr Szasz, I know there is no such thing as mental illness, but this head case does not. Queen E was narked she couldn’t get travel insurance for the regular price, that only a handful of companies would provide any such insurance anyway, and these charged up to twenty times as much as normal.
First though, let me dispose of the Queen E moniker. This woman has no class, she is less like the real Queen E than her sister, the late Princess Margaret, although I doubt she has yet got round to shagging Mick Jagger.
As I tried to explain to Queen E patiently, time and time again, an insurance company is in business to make a profit. It does this by taking in more money than it pays out. Insurance is something people buy hoping they will never need. Ever bought an umbrella? Sure you have. Some insurance is mandatory; driving without insurance is a very serious offence. Insurance companies use people called actuaries to calculate the risk involved in insuring people, buildings, etc. This includes life assurance. Obviously, calculating when a particular person will die is not possible, but in a group of X thousands of people chosen by various criteria - especially age - it is likely that a certain number will be dead in a set period of years.
Clearly, in the absence of special circumstances, men aged 60-65 will die before a similar group of men aged 30-35. And just as clearly, a group of women who are not right in the head or have other negative characteristics, will be more likely to be taken ill on holiday, or in Queen E’s case to be arrested, than a similar group of normal women. Just as it is not possible to predict when a particular individual will die, so it is not possible to make specific predictions about Queen E. Therefore she will be insured not on the same basis as an ordinary woman but on the same basis as a group of mental defectives.
She and her supporters can whine and wail and sign petitions galore about the evils of discrimination, but no insurance company worthy of the name will buckle to them. Not if it wants to stay in business.
Very predictable comment from the Darkman. In real life somebody that has suffered a heart attack, for instance, and has been treated and is medically supervised is less likely to suffer another heart attack than those in a similar age and lifestyle group that are still waiting for their first heart attack.
ReplyDeleteMental illness is a broad heading and includes such sub-headings as depression that can vary from mild to severe and temporary to permanent and is something that rarely prevents people functioning relatively normally and once treated these people are mostly indistinguishable from "normal" people.
Labelling someone as having a mental illness or having a history of mental illness and loading their insurance premiums simply because they are a member of a statistical group remains highly discriminatory and amounts to profiteering.