Jupiter551 said:
No one said anything about walmart trying to kill people, she had asthma. She wasn't even working for them when she died, neither Michael Moore nor the woman's family either said OR implied that. Where are you getting this from?
It's plain WEIRD for a company to take out insurance on employees like a person who worked for them as a cake decorator for 18 months. That's fucking weird. It's also scummy to make money out of someone's death but let the family (the husband having worked for them for 18 years) send themselves broke paying the medical bills.
No one, *EVER* said or implied Walmart wanted her to die or tried to kill her, but they DID profit from her death and she wasn't even working for them at the time. It's fucking weird, creepy, morbid, and wrong.
As the ABC news report points no employees were harmed by this. In the case Walmart this was actually a benefit for the employees. Prior to this Walmart rank file employee had no life insurance, because of the profits they made by taking out larger life insurance policies, Walmart was able to provide small insurance policy sufficient to cover burial expenses to its employees. In addition until recently Walmart had profit sharing plan for their employees, so the money Walmart saved in taxes increased the size its employee profit sharing checks.
The implication of Moore piece that Walmart made $82,000 from the death of their former employee. As I explained insurance is a bet and there are winners and loser. So Walmart made money cause the woman died young. However, an insurance company lost $82,000 because had to a pay out a claim long before it collected sufficient policies. In the case of Walmart (and I suspect almost other firms involved with this practice). The losing insurance company in this case was a wholly owned subsidiary of Walmart. So every underwriting dollar Walmart made collecting death benefit from it is employee was canceled out by the losses the Walmart insurance company suffered writing the policy.
The reason the scheme is a money making one is because the cost of providing insurance for employee is deductible,while the death benefits generally aren't taxable. Now this is as a result of lobbying by the insurance companies, Walmart and other corporations are simply benefiting from insurance company lobbying. This clearly needs to be changed (along with a ton of other stuff in our corporate and income tax laws.) But if you want to condemn every person/company who exploits a loophole in the tax, you pretty much cover everyone.
It's fucking weird, creepy, morbid, and wrong.
I find nothing weird about any company or person trying to legally minimize taxes which what is they were trying to do. Weird to me is something like collect bottle of sperm from fans and pouring it over yourself.
Morbid sure but virtually everything to with life or health insurance has a morbid aspect associated with it. There is almost always somebody who benefits from somebody dying earlier it is the nature of the insurance business.
Creepy, Wrong ok well you are entitled to your opinion. But on the list of bad stuff that corporations this pretty benign cause there are no victims other than people finding it creepy. I think the actions of Cam sites, which make young, often unsophisticated, woman sign contracts giving the cam company the right to use naked images of these woman anywhere on the internet for what ever purposed they want, forever even long after they quit Camming, this to me is creepy and wrong.
