Is it just me, or does it seem like EVERY business is a ripoff scheme these days?

All the spam in my inbox, all the flyers in the mail, every thing that is being hawked at us everywhere from insurance, to those art schools where you have to draw a turtle, to HMOs to student loans...

Doesn't it seem like most bigger-ticket products and services these days either are designed to fleece you in one way or another, or they don't deliver on their promises?

Remember when if you bought insurance on your house, you could actually expect to get something if your house was damaged? When you paid a reasonable monthly premium for health insurance and could go see a doctor of your choice? I'm pretty sure under my dad's insurance when I was a kid, there wasn't even a copay for office visits?

Oh, how about "Dental Insurance"? I bought Delta Dental last year, and it covered less than half of the super-high prices of dental services, and would only pay for amalgam fdillings which no dentist in California will even do anymore because they are full of lead...



Why is everything a ripoff today?

Why do I feel like I am living in a massive kleptocracy?

Am I just old, and romanticizing the past? Didn't we once actually get something for our money?

Didn't I?

Now it's just corruption, greed, selfishness, and cynicism, of that I increasingly believe.


Okay, not all elements of the past were so hot either, but for a time after World War II, the working class was treated somewhat decently...

and word-of-mouth recommendations are important.

Yeah, I know insurance severely limits our choices these days. You've got to try to work around that as much as you can. Especially WRT dentists.

and shysters and 'WE' have recently discovered the chinese corporate culture may also be as bad or worse. The corporate criminals have no defense as the evidence of their chiseling is abundant and across all sectors of the economy. Former corporate criminals are presently running our country; their corrupt behavior has been carried over into our government. The robber barons' demise will come sooner, rather than later, as the masses are getting close to the breaking point.

I mean sure, I get the spam garbage, but who is stupid enough to fall for that crap?

As far as regular every day things, business seems to me the same as it ever was. Just a bit more up with the times.

...to contribute "that" POV.


I don't know who is"stupid" enough to fall for spam, but if nobody did, they wouldn't send it out, would they?

About how you are FORCED to have homeowners' and car insurance but if you actually USE them you are penalized for it.

...on the purchase of that asset. That is the bank, live with it or pay cash. The penalty is the same one most with insurance have to put up with, make a claim and watch your premiums go up. (Not that I don't agree with the original poster. A good many businesses, (including too many insurers) these days are organised on the principle of providing the minimum level of service that consumers will stand for, for the highest payment they will stand for.)


The simple fact is that entities offering insurance as a commodity should NEVER be publicly owned. Floating the provision of insurance on the stock exchange creates an immediate and irreconcilable conflict of interest. The owner (stockholder) wants to make a maximum profit otherwise there would be no point in investing, the customer wants the recompense he paid for, when things in his world go badly titsup. Giving the customer what he paid for, reduces the potential profit to the shareholder. Now the company has a legal obligation to maximise it's return to shareholders, which can only be achieved through minimising paying claims made by customers.

There is no happy middle ground. Any "profit" to shareholders must come at the expense of customers, paying more than they otherwise might for the same "return". And any payment of claims can only reduce the "return" to the shareholder.

Logically, the only solution is that the owner and customer be the same entity, since it is the only possible scenario in which "shareholder" and "consumer" can both (by virtue of being one and the same) maximise their return on investment.

And this also involves the credit industry, which penalizes people several times for the same "problem" - whether it's reasonable or not, and affects every other financial transaction in your life.

:shrug:

I don't take home much money, either. It's a good thing I love what I do.

Best vet I ever saw really worked with the cat/dog. Not worked on. Worked with.

He's practicing in Guam today.

"buyer beware" has always been a great phylosophy. I can't recall ever being ripped off, but I check and double check EVERYTHING I spend my money on.

BTW, I don't know how old you are, but when my boys were kids, there was no copay on insurance, BUT it was "Hospitalization" NOT health care!Office visits were not covered at all, but they only cost $5.00! There also was no drug coverage, but again, an expensive medicine was $10.00! Th biggest difference is that now, most HC policies have an 80/20 plan for hospital coverage, and THAT can bankrupt you in a heartbeat if you have something very serious and expensive!

When I think of my father - an honest man who believed in giving his best to everything he did - I am just glad he is not here to see how things have turned out. Not only would his heart be broken, but he too would have been played for a stooge like the rest of us are.

I have a theory about capitalism. At the end of its rope it becomes cannibalism. It can only destroy itself.
Socialism went broke and capitalism devours until there is nothing left.

Innovation is downright punished, and parasitism of all forms is elevated. Large corporations have BECOME the government, eradicating oversight:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/index_np.html
In key areas. The result is the suppression of what we used to think of as the "free market" and the beginning of a Soviet Style state, with the ruling apparatus being a conglomerate of mega-corporations rather than a political party.

Scary.

legally and not have to deliver a product. It's really crazy except that they haven't figured out that eventually when their marks don't have jobs or money anymore, their scams won't work. Oh, I did forget about debtors prisons. It seems since our new fascism has brought us back torture and imperialism, debtors prisons should be only around the corner.

Look, just take the cash, and do what I ask. No, I don't want to sign up for the lifestyle makeover plan with $1899 per month no-frills insurance cover, I just want the candy bar.

Oh, for France. It may take half a lifetime to get major work done, but offering to pay for the little things still often brings a look of incomprehension: "Money? You use that? You Anglo-Saxons are so quaint!"

You state that you purchased it and it only covered half your bill, I usually go 2 times a year and it costs me about $140 a visit without insurance, but if I could pay something like $120 a year for insurance and it saved me half my cost that would be worth it.

And with the idea that every business is trying to rip people off that is not really the case, I run a small business and I get some people who balk at my rates saying I am trying to rip them off but at the end of the day 90% of what I make goes to pay bills for the business and 10% goes to me. I actually made more money working for someone else but I like being the boss.

...but any work quickly brings the bill into the many hundres or even thousands.

I would have been willing to pay more for real insurance where the out-of-pocket cost per visit or procedure is less than 10%, but insurance that only pays half is not insurance, it's a discount card.

Here in Japan, dental and health are all covered with a $5 office copay, and my monthy premiums are very reasonable.

I am eternally grateful to have escaped from the US fleecing machine.

with it, and so not surprisingly, they try to continuously increase their ill-gotten gains, and more companies and individuals enter the scamming business, because there is so much more money to be made there than in a legitimate business. we need a much beefed-up better business bureau, that will crack down on these scammers and side with the people against the robber-barons.

That's about the cost of having the dude look inside my mouth, isn't it? Still it does pay 100% of cleanings, so that's why I bought it.
Couldn't afford the medical insurance though. A hundred bucks a month for just me. When I started work for Verizon just 5 years ago nothing came out of my paycheck to cover my individual medical insurance. They paid it all and I just made my co-pays when I saw the doctor...

because my wife was using someone recommended instead on in our discount plan.

I checked the plan price and it's $53 a tooth.

Jokes have been told about this for decades.

It's not the you're too old. It's that you're not old enough. Before FDR, businesses were even bigger frauds (though the current scams are giving the Golden Oldies a run for their money)

predatory lenders and other unregulated scams are pervasive in the financial services industry (insurance, banking, credit cards, etc.)

the pharmaceutical industry and the predatory insurance companies have utterly destroyed our health care system--if you get reasonable basic care, it is by accident

the only manufacturers left in America are making weapons and other systems of death--all other manufactured goods come from China and are laden with poisons, hazardous materials and designs

lack of any meaningful governmental oversight and a wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude toward cheaters, liars, thieves and scam artists has made it open season on consumers

unregulated capitalism has created a kind of feudal anarchy

Is that it countinues to approve people for more and more cards, even when they KNOW that the cardholders have too high a debt load for their income. It should be illegal to give a person a new credit person when that person has revolving balances of more than 10~20% of their annual income, but the credit industry will continue to give them more cards until the debt load is almost 100% of the person's income, then they start to turn them down, and simultaneously, upon "reviewing the cardholder's credit" and finding that their debt load is too high, they all start to jack their rate up to the "default" (penalty) rate which is between 21% and 29%. Even at the lower rates, it would take about 40 years for a guy making $30K to pay off $20k in debt while paying the minimums, and with prices soaring, he will probably keep using the cards to buy groceries, ensuring that he is permanently trapped in the debt prison. I would highly recommend ANYONE in this situation to immediately declare bankruptcy. That is no way to live - I know from experience.

The onerous fees are pretty bad too, but the overextension of credit to people who they KNOW cannot offord it is the WORST. F-U Hairplugs Biden!

Americans do not realize that everything, including their government, has been turned into a MAJOR SCAM.

and they are the parasites. If we die off, so do they.

Put some big fucking teeth in it.

I've noticed in the past few years how steeply the quality in the products we buy has declined. Naturally ,of course, the businesses still charge the same price or higher.

And how insurance companies charge more and more for even less coverage.

Those are called the good old days!

Before deregulation.

"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Hunter S. Thompson

And YES, you are correct. I've been saying this to my wife for years, we've crossed the rubicon and finally created a society that is nearly completely without merit, a nation of Vending Machines instead of Human beings, and a Service Industry that is nothing but bad service. Too bad, this was once a really nice country, a nice place to raise your kids.. of course that was back in the day when we all got together (or at least my parents did) with the Neighbors and NO ONE GAVE A SHIT if you were a Republican or Democrat.. all that was important was if you were kind or decent, and needed another burger or beer.

I miss those days, and doubt that we'll ever see them again.

You're not the only one that notices these things, so don't feel to alone :)

We're gonna NEED people like YOU when the Humans Take Over...