Does the President Actually Understand the Concept of Insurance?
Posted by Shannon Love on February 28th, 2010 (All posts by Shannon Love)
As much as leftists like to call Sarah Palin stupid, I’m think I can confidently assert that she knows the difference between liability and comprehensive automotive insurance.
I have long assumed that the demagoguery by Obama and other leftists against the insurance companies was just cynical “eat the rich” politics. I assumed that behind closed doors, these Ivy League grads did actually understand that insurance provides protection against statistical risk only and not protection against absolute certainties. I assumed they understood that money being payed out in claims has to be balanced out by money paid in as premiums or the entire system will collapse very quickly.
However, hearing the President speak on the matter of insurance over the course of the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that he, personally, simply does not understand how insurance works. I fear that no one else around him really understands either.
I say this because if he did understand how insurance worked, he would know that the story about his car insurance would make him look like an idiot.
He would have known that most people would say, “Well, yes, liability insurance pays for the damage that you might do to the property and lives of others. Comprehensive pays to repair the damage to your own car. The law requires that you protect the rights of others, it doesn’t require that pay for your own car in any particular way. Everybody know this.”
[ I don't understand how someone can get to adulthood in American and not know this kind of thing. ]
I find myself hoping that the video clip was somehow taken out of context and he was trying to illustrate something else, like, how naive young people can be about financial affairs.
Yet looking back at his keynote speech of last year we see the same shocking naiveté/cynicism.
What this plan will do is make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a preexisting condition.
I think he sees insurance in some kind moralistic literary terms. I don’t think he actually understands how the mathematics of insurance limit any insurer’s options, even the government’s. I think he believes that premiums, payouts and profits are all ultimately utterly arbitrary and that if we want a different system, we must simply just will ourselves to behave differently and thus bring it about.
Still I hope I am wrong. I’m not sure I can sleep well at night knowing that the man who has both the desire and the power to re-engineer our society doesn’t really understand one of its most important functional parts.
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Mad in Madtown Says:
February 28th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
I was happy that you commented on his insurance statement during the summit. It seemed totally off-topic, as well as off-the-mark as far as comprehension of insurance.
If he doesn’t understand a concept as simple as basic insurance coverage, it makes me wonder what other concepts he does not understand.
Several people have commented who knew him at UofC that he would adhere steadfastly to beliefs no matter what opposing arguments might be shown to undermine those beliefs.
It is one thing to not understand a concept and to seek more information from others who do know, but to expose one’s ignorance and then willfully go forward with faulty thinking as the President is indeed a very, very serious.
Knowing what one does NOT know is as important as knowing what one does know.
President Obama did himself no favors in speaking about his own car insurance incident.
Michael Kennedy Says:
February 28th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
This goes along with the next post on alternative energy. He doesn’t even seem to know that, when someone runs into your car from behind, it is their fault and you call THEIR insurance company to get your car fixed. This is the basic matter of knowing how the world works. Even Charlie Gibson, no right winger, knew that capital gains taxes affect investment and may result in lower revenue if the tax rate is so high that investment is discouraged. Obama’s reply suggested he doesn’t care but I even wonder if that concept was new to him.
This man seems to have little concept of how a modern society functions. We still don’t know how he was accepted to Harvard or what his grades were. He seems to me to have drifted along. I’m not conspiracy minded but I do wonder who guided him along. I wonder sometimes if he could have fed himself, left to his own devices. He’s not stupid but he seems to have lived 45 years and more with a very tenuous connection with practical life.
[ Reminds me that he invited Rezko to look over his house purchase. Why? Did he really think Rezko wasn't just a scammer and actually knew something about houses and real estate? ]
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Ginny Says:
March 1st, 2010 at 2:35 am
Perhaps it is because I’m not a very good driver and have more conversations with my insurance company than they or I would like, but I honestly can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t know the difference between liability and comprehensive, that doesn’t know who is at fault in a rear end. That that someone is a lawyer makes it even stranger. What strikes me about this is that he must have gone through life with absolutely no curiosity about the world around him, no humility about what he didn’t know and no sense that he was responsible for anything.
How many times have we been told this guy is brilliant? How many times have we been told that George Bush was not only stupid but completely lacking in intellectual curiosity? I suspect that he, like most of us, at some point had an accident or listened to a friend discuss an accident, talked to his insurer, listened to his options. Perhaps not, but I can’t imagine that guy, a son of privilege, not assuming that insurance choices were his and not the government’s.
Obama’s assumptions are deeply disturbing: the government doesn’t, shouldn’t, make laws that force us to insure clunkers as we do a new Lexus, that require us all to make the same choices. These people have made a mockery of diversity.
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