One of my younger friends appears to be in perfect health, hale and hearty, but he is uninsurable. He is uninsurable, meaning more specifically that no company will sell him life insurance, because of his cholesterol count and some predisposition to heart problems. There is no national entitlement to life insurance, at least not yet, and he's had to provide for his dependents in other ways. Venerable Father Laquedem similarly became uninsurable for several years after having a cancer operation. The principle is that a life insurance company can look at a prospective customer's history and determine whether it's willing to bet on the customer's survival, and if so, what rate it will charge to take the bet. Similarly, some property insurers decline to insure certain houses because of the claims history of those houses.
Following up on yesterday's post, I'd like one particular non-life insurance company, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to adopt the principle of uninsurability, by holding that the business history of the officers and directors of some of our failed and failing banks makes them uninsurable, or more exactly makes uninsurable any institution in which they serve as makers of policy. The FDIC could start by declaring uninsurable the directors and senior officers of Corus Bank, a Chicago bank that was closed last year. This article about its failure doesn't mince words: it says "Chicago's Corus Bank, which made a disastrous bet on condo towers in South Florida, was closed by federal regulators on Friday."
It's past time for the FDIC to start its own "no-fly list."