I Call Bullshit on That

So I really was raised to be honest, believe it or not. I learned over time, that my parents weren't honest all the time. They mostly were. As I learned more about their lives, their childhoods, I began to understand why they acted as they did, those times they weren't honest . . . those gray areas I spoke about in my previous article, The Truth. I understand that if your spouse asks, "Do these jeans make me look fat?" the right answer is almost always "No, honey and you look amazing in them."

This blog will be a mix of inspirational stories by myself and others - that would be you folks - but also a forum for truth - a place to call a spade a spade when necessary - with as much kindness and understanding as possible. But where the truth will be said in order for us to grow and make things better. This is one of those articles.

When I was getting an MBA from Belmont University in Nashville, TN, I was in a class where each of us had to do a presentation, in the field in which we were employed at the time. There was a banker who told us that banks actually wanted you to bounce checks. The bounced check fees were their bread and butter, where they made most of their profit from. Similarly for credit card companies who want you to pay late, so they can fine you and raise your interest rate.

There was a person who worked for in the correctional industry (prisons) who was talking about privatizing prisons and using them to make money. I've since heard horrible stories about privatized prisons about how they treat prisoners.

Another person spoke about healthcare here compared to other countries. Stating that the universal healthcare in other countries wasn't always truly universal and there were often long delays in accessing care. He said, "If we provide universal healthcare to everyone in the US, who would pay for it?" And then went on to give us stats about the cost of healthcare and how we simply couldn't afford to do that.

I also remember "trickle-down" economics which was the idea that if you pay rich people and rich organizations more, it will trickle down to poor people. It was used to structure tax laws so that the rich got richer by paying less taxes. At some point I did some research for some reason, can't remember why now. It might have been for another class I was taking. But I do remember that my conclusion was that the money did not trickle down.

For this piece, I do want to say "allegedly" to caveat that this is my recollection, because Lord knows, we are a litigious society. So you can determine your perception of the amount of truth in it.

I was working in the insurance industry at the time as a healthcare, life, and disability underwriter. So I was the one who was actually calculate the rates and telling an employer what they would have to pay for insurance, which in turn, would drive the cost that employees would pay.

There were several practices that concerned me there. First of all, you were in training for six months before they let you start the actual work on the job, before you were underwriting for them. During that training, they had a chapter in our book called, "Telling the story." It was about how to convince the sales representative that the rates you calculated were the right rates so that they could convince the employer. I remember thinking and I actually said this to my classmates, "that sounds like lying."

Another example. When setting the rates, we had to calculate a number called a "reserve" that was to pay for claims that had been incurred but not paid for yet. This was mostly because the healthcare provider and the patient have a long deadline before they have to file the claim. At that time I think they had at least six months. So you had to include those expected costs in the rates.

Here was the concern. The insurance company had us calculate this reserve value eight different ways and then recommended that we include the highest value in the resulting rates. I remember thinking, "there is no valid reason for this" except profit and greed. That there should be two or three ways to look at this particular calculation and then chose one that made sense based on all the factors of that company and its population.

Again, this was my understanding through the grapevine. The last year I was there, they decided they wanted to lower overhead so that they could make their financials look better and drive up the stock price. So they decided to fire, layoff, whatever you want to call it, twenty five percent of the employees in the entire company. They told all supervisors in every department to make a list of the people who would be fired; and they fired them. I was lucky in this because I was on a department of "two". If my supervisor had layed off one of use this would have decreased the staff by fifty percent. So I think she was able to prove that the work could not get done if she layed off one of us. So both of us were retained.

But I remember how awful it was where everyone was told that the layoffs were going to occur on a given day. They should be at their desk and they would receive a phone call to come to HR. The phones would ring and people would head to HR. It was later the next year that I heard that the company had record earnings that year. Ironically, their corporate logo that year was a tree and their slogan was "a business of caring."

I say all this to say that we've been lied to. Bamboozled. A lot. Governments, businesses and other organizations and leaders have lied to us. It is hurting us and fostering a world that isn't as good as it could be. Creating a constant environment of fear. When people fear losing their jobs or being hungry or homeless or hurt physically or psychologically or being trapped in a life they hate, they behave in ways they never would, if they felt secure.

Ironically again, we have been given everything we need to take care of every person on the planet. If we eliminate wasteful activities like war, taxes, computer hacking, prisons, banking, violence, etc. Now I know this creates fear too. We've been taught to fear socialism and communism and such. But first look at these numbers. These values show that we can more than afford to take care of all of us and this makes total sense if you believe in a benevolent, creative power or spirit.

The math shows us that if we eliminate wasteful activities for 1.5 years we can create this better world and after that that we will have 9 times the resources we have now if we do so. You can download the Excel file with the backup data, calculations, data sources and what's included in these numbers and what isn't:

The Math.xlsx

Download XLSX • 31KB

As for the "how' - how we will do this - I'll speak to this in the next post as this is a long one and most people hate math. So get a cup of coffee and check these numbers out and then go do something fun!