The responses to this article are interesting... and remarkably consistent. One person wrote...

"As someone who has worked in the insurance industry for nearly 30 years, both for an insurer and then as a consultant, I can only second what Mr. Potter says. It is all true."

OTOH, that didn't stop him from working in that industry for 30 years, did it? The system is particularly insidious because it tacitly encourages us to continue contibuting to a dishonest, but legal enterprise because it is lucrative and because our work ethos conveniently absolves us from any guilt or responsibility. "I'm just doing my job" is English for "I vass chust followink orderss."

"If you don't agree with what you're doing...quit!", we are told. Except that never seems to be an option, does it? Instead we are taught that you owe your employer loyalty, and your only recourse to a moral dilemma is your own economic suicide. (Or to join them by starting your own business).

That's what I mean by economic power. Individually, the carbon units plugged into the corporate machine may be good honest people, but the corporate body collectively acts only in its own best interest.

It's very important that we divorce ourselves from this infantile notion that companies are run by human beings, the same way armies are run by generals. The corporate body is a primitive life form of its own, its human components respond to automatically generated orders and commands with little say in policy. And even at the management and executive level, the leadership essentially must answer to the stockholders and the board. They must behave in a way that benefits the collective, not their own conscience or the public interest.

Insurance companies, or any large firms, are not the neighborhood auto dealership or local Mattress Mart. They are semi-sentient administrative life forms interested only in their own perpetuation. And more and more corporate decision making is now being automated and put in the hands of pre-written policies, or even software.

In fact, in many ways, what big companies most resemble is a bloated government bureaucracy, and both behave remarkably like primitive life forms.