Insurance
In which Rat is on his own
Good time of day, humans!
Insurance woes have been on everyone’s tongue lately. (I’ll be using U.S. data but the issues are similar everywhere.)
Here’s a piece written by The Inmate before the recent events in California (contains links; make sure to check the comments as well):
Another data point: the number of humans employed in the U.S. insurance industry was mostly flat at 2.35M from around 2000 to 2011 which is what one could expect given number crunching is being increasingly passed on to machines. Since 2012, said number is however rising again and is probably around 3M now:
[Statista] Number of employees in the insurance industry in the United States from 1960 to 2022
All those humans need to be paid.
Before blaming «climate change» or globalist conspiracy, I’d suspect increasing regulation and decreasing competition though. But that’s me, in reality there’s likely a number of factors behind the current issues.
It is the way they process claims, not to mention all the fraud needs to be investigated. Lots of criminals commit insurance fraud. In spectacular fashion the same way they commit credit fraud. You have to be trained( should be, this probably isn't going on really anymore at even entry levels anymore and gets into the high backend of the industries) to spot fraud, turn in the fraud, prevent the fraud and that helps keep costs low for people. Money goes out but where does it come from? There's not a way they could yank it out of the ground fast enough.
There appears increasing demand for all the things insurance companies do; not just policy underwriting. I suspect a lot of the hiring reflects the Boomer retirement bulge, especially the fixed income, asset management, life insurance fields.