TODAY, matters of business and finance. In particular the newly thriving business known as Serious Illness Insurance.
Serious Illness Insurance differs from Fairly Ordinary Illness Insurance and Odd Sick Day Here and There Insurance and Monday Morning Headache Insurance because it has the potential to make serious money for insurance companies.
It is a hard business slathered in soft substances soap, oil, grease, eyewash, unction, balm, butter, honey, treacle, blubber, milk of human concern and eau de yuk, the whole glutinous mixture smeared on with a trowel.
"Statistically", we were told in a recent advertising feature devoted to the business, "40 is the age at which health starts to deteriorate."
This is utter twaddle. Life itself being a death sentence, you might as well says health starts to deteriorate at birth and gets worse until you die. Except in insurance mumbo jumbo land, there is no particular age at which health starts to deteriorate.
Fortunately, the majority of people in the Western world do not get seriously ill until they are old and infirm. I have not got the appropriate statistics to hand, or any other part of my anatomy, but that is nonetheless true. Except in certain circumstances, Serious Illness Insurance is therefore a waste of money.
Serious Illness Insurance for some reason is not readily available in the Third World.
The only time you really need Serious Illness Insurance (SILLI, as the trade knows it) is when you are about to die and incur the wrath of your family for not leaving them enough. At that point it is oddly difficult to get cover.
Your insurance agent, who hitherto clung like a neurotic barnacle, is now to be found frolicking hand in hand on the beach with the banker who offered you a lifeline as you paddled in the shallows, but laughingly refused it when he saw you on the point of drowning.
The part played by insurance companies themselves in creating and prolonging illness is not fully appreciated. Their contribution in the areas of stress, nervous break down and death by boredom is immense.
They are not the healthiest crowd themselves either. Repetitive Strain Syndrome, which comes from repeating oneself ad nauseam, is an occupational hazard, and I will say nothing of their wildly promiscuous relationship with statistics or of the transmittable diseases involved.
Many Serious Illness Insurance pushers also suffer what they lugubriously call the Loss of Independent Existence. These sad cases are totally dependent on the clients they rope in without them they die, though not quickly enough.
Anyway, I plan to set up an insurance company which will provide protection against the approaches of insurance companies. The Insurance Insurance Company will be a sure winner. Serious Insurance Insurance will protect against people trying to sell you Serious Illness Insurance, while small annual premiums will cover the cost of Little Fib Insurance, White Lie Insurance, Equivocation Insurance, Statistical Warp Insurance and Complete Whopper Insurance.
My clients are thus guaranteed that insurance nirvana, peace of mind.
The most remarkable thing about all the above is that I have not once mentioned "loved ones".
All right. I am further irritated this morning by the lazy media use of the term "carpet bagger" in reference to people opening UK building society accounts solely to qualify for cash/share bonuses if and when the society converts to a bank.
These people may accurately be described as speculators or gamblers, but to call them carpetbaggers is to extend the confusion in the public mind attached to the financial adventurers who headed to the southern states of the US after the Civil War.
Quite a few of these original carpet baggers were undoubtedly cheats and frauds on a grand scale, but others served America well in the national and state legislatures, helped put together an enlightened constitution, sorted out the public school systems, equalised the tax load and in general concerned themselves with the rights of newly enfranchised black people.
To call the building society speculators "carpet baggers" thus suggests they are either crooks or philanthropists, when it is likely that few of them are in either category.
