A.I.G. was even larger than Lehman, with a substantial presence in derivatives and debt markets, as well as in insurance markets.
When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.
There's definitely evidence that capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior. When you look at the worst corners of the American health insurance industry or the sub-prime banking market, it really feels like the more psychopathically someone behaves, the more it's rewarded.
Since the 17th century, insurance agents have been the foremost experts on risk.
For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.
AIG would be doing fine today. It was one of the ten largest companies in the United States in terms of market value, over 200 billion, the most respected insurer and everything in the world.
If I brought groceries the way I buy health insurance, I'd eat a lot better - and so would my dog.
Underwriting is probably the smallest part of our business.
No American should ever have to spend his golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.
Everyone should have health insurance? I say everyone should have health care. I'm not selling insurance.
Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.
The Republican program is the profit-protection program for the insurance industry It's a bill of goods, it's a bill of wrongs. Ours is a patients' bill of rights.
My father wasn't much for show business. He was an insurance man - very well-liked, very warm. He had a lot of friends.
Everybody you talk to about insurance says the insurance market has become a lot more vibrant as a result of lifting, allowing the foreign direct investment.
We have to do a better job of putting some rules on the insurance companies.
The insurance companies have control of the legislature. They get what they want and stop what they don’t.
After I finished university and started going to auditions again, and I also did a bunch of other jobs. I worked in the insurance industry, the digital media industry; I worked in a financial services company for three years.
My father, John, ran the Dowd Insurance Co. in town, which was started by his great-grandfather. My mother, Dolores, was a homemaker who kept an eye on all of us.
In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly, and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.
My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the '50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like - you had - 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.
Today we have a health insurance industry where the first and foremost goal is to maximize profits for shareholders and CEOs, not to cover patients who have fallen ill or to compensate doctors and hospitals for their services. It is an industry that is increasingly concentrated and where Americans are paying more to receive less.
Well, my view is that the insurance companies have done awfully well and spent a lot of money on a lot of things that don't have anything to do with health care.
My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.
The insurance industry communicates through codes and check-off boxes. If there's no check-off box for you, you don't exist.
The solid wealth of insurance companies and the success of those who organsie gambling are some indication of the profits to be derived from the efficient use of chance.
