Hicup
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2009
- Messages
- 9,081
- Reaction score
- 2,709
- Location
- Rochester, NY
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Very Conservative
Excerpt -
Ok, so I read the whole story. I suggest everyone who's interested do so as well.
The crux of the issue is this. Apparently insurance companies are making a profit off their beneficiaries. In some ways, I don't mind this, but its the way it is all going down that I dislike. The method in which they do it is sneaky, almost to the point of scheme-ish, maybe even predatory.
What are your thoughts?
Should FULL, in plain sight disclosure, be regulated?
Tim-
The package arrived at Cindy Lohman’s home in Great Mills, Maryland, just two weeks after she learned that her son, Ryan, a 24-year-old Army sergeant, had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. It was a thick, 9-inch-by- 12-inch envelope from Prudential Financial Inc., which handles life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Inside was a letter from Prudential about Ryan’s $400,000 policy. And there was something else, which looked like a checkbook. The letter told Lohman that the full amount of her payout would be placed in a convenient interest-bearing account, allowing her time to decide how to use the benefit.
“You can hold the money in the account for safekeeping for as long as you like,” the letter said. In tiny print, in a disclaimer that Lohman says she didn’t notice, Prudential disclosed that what it called its Alliance Account was not guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its September issue.
Lohman, 52, left the money untouched for six months after her son’s August 2008 death.
“It’s like you’re paying me off because my child was killed,” she says. “It was a consolation prize that I didn’t want.”
As time went on, she says, she tried to use one of the “checks” to buy a bed, and the salesman rejected it. That happened again this year, she says, when she went to a Target store to purchase a camera on Armed Forces Day, May 15.
Link to story
Ok, so I read the whole story. I suggest everyone who's interested do so as well.
The crux of the issue is this. Apparently insurance companies are making a profit off their beneficiaries. In some ways, I don't mind this, but its the way it is all going down that I dislike. The method in which they do it is sneaky, almost to the point of scheme-ish, maybe even predatory.
What are your thoughts?
Should FULL, in plain sight disclosure, be regulated?
Tim-
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