Did health insurance companies get bailout money?
i'm trying to do some research, and i couldn't find it anywhere... but does anyone know if the health insurance companies like Aetna, Assurant, Boston Mutual, etc. got any bailout money?
Public Comments
- NO.
- The term health insurance is generally used to describe a form of insurance that pays for medical expenses. It is sometimes used more broadly to include insurance covering disability or long-term nursing or custodial care needs. It may be provided through a government-sponsored social insurance program, or from private insurance companies. It may be purchased on a group basis (e.g., by a firm to cover its employees) or purchased by individual consumers. In each case, the covered groups or individuals pay premiums or taxes to help protect themselves from high or unexpected healthcare expenses. Similar benefits paying for medical expenses may also be provided through social welfare programs funded by the government. By estimating the overall risk of healthcare expenses, a routine finance structure (such as a monthly premium or annual tax) can be developed, ensuring that money is available to pay for the healthcare benefits specified in the insurance agreement. The benefit is administered by a central organization, most often either a government agency or a private or not-for-profit entity operating a health plan
- It is hard to find out.
- They may not have directly, but it is important to remember how interdependent the insurance industry is. They may well have offloaded some of the risk to other companies which DID receive a bailout and hence indirectly benefit from the bailout package. You'd be hard pushed to find this kind of information available publicly as it is commercially sensitive. Personally (and it's just my own, but informed, opinion) I'd say there wasn't an insurance company anywhere in the world that didn't 'benefit' to least some degree from the bailout of AIG. I use the word 'benefit' advisedly since they didn't gain anything, they just didn't 'lose' as they would have if AIG had failed.
Powered by Yahoo! Answers