Thought you had seen it all? Think again.

Oklahoma’s insurance commissioner, Kim Holland, wants to penalize those who don’t have health insurance with such tactics as forcing them to forfeit their University of Oklahoma football season tickets and taking away their fishing licenses.

An article in a recent issue of The Daily Oklahoman also quoted a state representative who echoed Holland’s call for what he calls “punishment” of those who don’t carry insurance.

Perhaps the best part of the article is reading the comments from citizens, which appear at the bottom of the page after the article.

I don’t know either of these people, but as the phrase goes, there is some doctor somewhere — and this case, public servant — who graduated last in their class. In this case, it appears they were drawn to Oklahoma.

About six weeks ago, I suggested in this blog that AIG stood for Anything I can Get and that’s exactly what the global insurer has proven. Since that pronouncement, the bankrolling by Uncle Sam has increased from $70 billion to about $125 billion to nearly $150 billion.

AIG could now stand for Ain’t It Grand or AIG Is Greedy. I could go on. You get the point.

AIG did, too. To help rehabilitate its bad name, the company has chosen to rename its aigdirect brand as 21st Century Insurance, an auto insurance firm it bought in 2007 to form aigdirect, according to an article at IFAwebnews.com.

Note how aigdirect is all lowercase to make it as distant as possible from its parent AIG. (That’s good marketing!)

Well, it would seem that its new 21st Century name is just as fitting as AIG. AIG officials have chosen a name for one of its companies that is historic. It captures the essence of this century, one where AIG officials’ actions so far are practically guaranteed to be featured in any business and political history book for years and years to come.

Previous posts had argued that Sen. Max Baucus might trump Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy in getting universal healthcare on the national agenda, while Kennedy himself tried to overstep President-elect Barack Obama, in Kenndy’s quest for some sort of “legacy.”

Perhaps Kennedy has gotten a blessing from Obama to move forward, with no in-fighting over who saved this poor, unhealthy and underinsured nation from itself. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Los Angeles Times and IFAwebnews.com, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus beat both Sen. Ted Kennedy and President-elect Barack Obama by being the first one out of the starting gate in the quest for health care “reform.”

And Baucus’s quest for the glory might, according to the Times, catch the incoming president and his staff off guard. Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy is a brawler, and as nice as he comes across sometimes, insiders have said that he is tough as nails and would just as soon step on a fallen man than step over him.

That being said, a safe bet would be that Ted Kennedy is going to try to introduce legislation designed to overhaul the U.S. health care system — and enact universal care — before a new President Barack Obama has the chance. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is a boondoggle that is costing Americans billions and billions of wasted dollars, is rife with fraud, and in some cases doing the opposite of what it was intended to do.

Continually lowering premiums have made it a money pit for federal funds, and the continual misuse by some homeowners is nearly criminal (and encouraged by the fed).

To make matters worse, some in Washington actually think that people who don’t have the insurance should be allowed to retroactively acquire the coverage, following a flood.

How crazy is that?

Michael Crowley, writing in Reader’s Digest, does an excellent job, in a short article, of exposing just how ridiculous this plan has become.

Variable annuities appear to be causing stockholders at insurance companies like Hartford Financial Services, Lincoln National Corp. and Prudential Financial offering these products to develop a case of the jitters, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Shareholders fear the insurers will be forced to sell these products to generate the capital needed to meet regulatory requirements. With market declines, Fitch recently said capital needed to support the variable annuity industry had increased by as much as $15 billion this year.

What remains unclear, according to the article, is how much of a role VAs play in the companies’ financials and how they will manage the risks associated with these products in a new economic climate.

Yet another impact of the sagging economy on the insurance industry.