First Published 11-24-10
If your state is like mine you are forced to by auto insurance. And insurance companies being insurance companies, if you’ve ever found yourself in a serious situation where you needed those benefits, you have found out that the insurance companies take a portion of what you pay in and use it to keep lawyers on retainer. If you get into a wreck and there are injuries involved you are going to have to sue to recover your damages and it will take years.
There are a lot of people out there talking about unemployment insurance like it is welfare. I wonder how many millions those who have been stealing the unemployment insurance monies for the last thirty years have paid to put that propaganda out. I think either we start treating unemployment insurance like insurance or quit calling it insurance.
Let’s look at it this way. If a rich man runs into my car with his Cadillac and hurts me to the point that I cannot work for six months, or a year, or two years, or more, his auto insurance has to fix or replace my car, pay my medical bills, and pay me dollar for dollar what I have lost in not being able to work.
I don’t think there is anybody left that will argue that it was the negligent actions of filthy rich corporate CEOs that put the 99ers out of work. I guess it could also be attributed to the negligent actions of our so called representatives that sent our industrial base and jobs overseas.
Now if you happen to be a person of property, you probably have personal liability insurance to insure that you do not lose your fortune because an action you have taken results in another citizen’s loss of property, injury, or death.
Now, let’s look at it another way. In my state if you happen to be working when you are injured in an auto accident, state workman’s compensation comes into play. And now you really need a lawyer as the state has set limits on your pain, suffering, and loss of body parts. It is conceivable that a negligent person’s insurance could be freed from liability just because you happen to be working when you were harmed.
Now let’s tie it all together. Five will get you ten that every scum bag on Wall Street who is responsible for this economic collapse and the subsequent loss of many of our jobs has personal liability insurance. It would seem if any individual could prove that his or her job loss was a direct result of the unquestionable negligence of a corporate CEO then he or she should be able to sue that CEO for the damages incurred, hence, loss of wages, until another job can reasonably be found.
So why couldn’t you do this? Well for the same reason previously stated, there is another state insurance involved and that is unemployment insurance. And like the state workman’s compensation insurance, the state unemployment insurance has limitations for recovery of damages.
In both instances the state compensation insurance and the state unemployment insurance violate the Constitutional rights of the individual to sue to gain redress for grievances and have the matter decided by a jury of his or her peers, and not by a judge who cannot be a juror. This right is taken away for no other reason than the person who suffered the damages was working.
You constantly hear cries for tort reform in reference to medical malpractice lawsuit. Then, in the next breath, you hear how people are being killed wholesale through sloppily done procedures, misdiagnoses, administrations of the wrong drugs, and out and out quackery. The insurance companies have not succeeded as of yet in getting the tort reform, but the insurance industry being the insurance industry, they will not stop until they do.
What all of this is telling us is that the lives of the average citizens are not as important as the preservation of the monies of the wealthy. I guess an insurance company’s perfect scenario would be a nation where the people are forced to buy their product and the most they can ever be forced to pay out is .001% of their profits. I believe if there was an audit of the unemployment insurance industry over the past thirty years we would find out that this is about what they have paid out to us from the monies we have paid in.
All you people out there trying to equate unemployment insurance with welfare are the exact kind of people who would vote for caps on malpractice liability suits. And, as I would hope that anyone who would vote in such a way would have to suffer the consequences of their decision, so too would I hope it to be for those who will not admit that unemployment insurance is insurance.