Oh, Too Bad ... It's Illegal

In my last post I proposed a life insurance scheme with which to bedevil our plutocratic overlords and make a little money on the side.  I got a few comments to the effect of, "Good idea, let me know if you implement it," so I did some research to see what it would take to set it up, and found out that it won't work. It turns out that about 10 years ago people started noticing that companies were insuring their employees without telling them or giving their heirs any part of the payout. And then other people started doing pretty much what I'd hoped to do: buy insurance on people they'd never met and had no direct interest in (and often inflated the earnings figures on the policy in order to get larger coverage).

So, several associations of insurers started lobbying campaigns to get the state governments, who have jurisdiction and regulatory power over the insurance business, to pass new laws to prevent what they felt was a kind of fraud.  The result is that since then, most of the states (including the state where I live and most of the surrounding states) have outlawed what they call STranger Originated Life Insurance (STOLI). Interestingly, the corporate behavior is still legal in most states, what they've outlawed is insuring someone whom you have no "direct financial or familial interest" in. So if the insured is your employee or your relative, even if they don't know you, it's OK as long as you don't sell the policy to someone in order to make money for the sale. But if the insured is a batshit-insane billionaire set on destroying the economy and society of America, and not related to you, forget it.d

Oh, well, back to the drawing board.  Maybe I'll come up with something else that will work.