Saving money on car insurance
GEICO commercials chant, “Fifteen minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.” The Allstate home page asks, “How much could you save? People who switched to Allstate saved an average of $348 per year.” State Farm’s website promises (with one small asterisk) “SAVE $489 when you switch to State Farm.” Progressive counters: “Get a FREE auto quote to see if you could save over $500!” And on and on.
I’m not going to link to these sites, because my point in mentioning this advertising tactic is to discredit it. It’s so frustratingly misleading, I think steam is actually going to pour out of my ears the next time I see a commercial using it.
I understand that any business wants to advertise the idea that it has low prices. But at some point, it becomes unrealistic. Some of the offers I hear imply that if I switched my car insurance to a particular insurance company, the company would be paying me — that’s the only way I could be said to “save” that much money in a year. And what if I switched again after that? If every insurance company saves you hundreds of dollars over every other insurance company, it never ends! We might have just discovered a flawless get-rich-quick scheme!
Of course, that’s not the claim they’re making per se. They’ve carefully phrased the ads to suggest it, but they’re squeaking by false advertising laws with their fine print, asterisks, and minced words. The simple fact is, people who switch from one insurance company to another are most likely going to do it because it saves them money. People who would not save money generally don’t switch. These averages are skewed because the sample is biased. Allstate policies aren’t $348 cheaper than all other policies on average; they’re just cheaper for the people who found that Allstate offered them cheaper policies and decided that switching car insurance was worth the hassle for that savings level. When GEICO says that “New GEICO customers report annual average savings over $500,” they haven’t actually promised that you’d have those savings. And presumably, if you didn’t save by switching, you wouldn’t become a new GEICO customer.
My guess at what’s actually happening? Perhaps different companies have different rates for different groups of people. Single people in their twenties and thirties might be seen as risky by most companies, but safe by one. Older married couples might find much cheaper policies with one or two companies than the rest. Adding a teen driver on your policy might be a much better deal with certain providers. When people in the right category find “their” insurance company, they switch and get big savings. I have no data about whether this is true — just speculating. (Feel free to add your better ideas in the comments.) Naturally, if this is the case, being forthright about it wouldn’t be a good business plan. You need to diversify risk in order to run a functional insurance company. If one or two firms end up with all the teen drivers, you can bet their rates for teen drivers would start to change.
The car insurance companies are trying to get you to associate their average new customer savings rates with their overall affordability level. Don’t let them. Sure, take the basic suggestion and shop around when you’re buying car insurance; look for who’s actually giving you the policy you want at the most affordable price. But as with any advertisement, don’t take all the implications too seriously.
Alternative medicine: worth a try?
A Daily Dish reader who asked to remain anonymous recently wrote in about their experiences using psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms,” for medicinal purposes. Andrew Sullivan received so many emails about mainstream marijuana use that he and his writing team compiled them into a book — and something similar has been happening lately on the topic of psilocybin. At the Dish, it’s a sociopolitical conversation mostly about the legal status of drugs, but that’s not really what I want to talk about today.
This reader wrote:
I take small (no more than a pinch or two) quantities of psilocybin every day. Not to get high, not to unwind, but to try to heal my body. For 5+ years I’ve had an autoimmune problem that’s demyelinating my peripheral nerves – it’s called neuropathy. I do take a monthly treatment of gamma globulin to try to stabilize it, but the prognosis is for a long slow decline. Since “western medicine” doesn’t really have a clue and basically has the equivalent of sledgehammers to treat this thing, I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities, including acupuncture and Chinese herbs, homeopathy, bio-energy balancing and strict diet. Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining. I suppose my fail-safe maneuver is to visit Lourdes or John of God in Brazil.
Anyway, fortunately I’ve also got contacts in the spiritual community of “medicine”, who have given me the idea of using what folks in Mexico call “the little healers”. I have a scientist friend who used it in small quantities daily to recover from bad asthma. It is reputed to help with the immune system (as well as anxiety and depression).
I am as yet too scared to undertake a full trip, which evidently can be like 6 months or a year’s worth of therapy in a few hours, but someday I will work up to it. I am befriending it right now, and I feel the mushrooms are helping my condition. You could call it merely a result of magic thinking, but what harm can it possibly cause? It’s natural, and I am determined to use whatever I can to heal.
Did you catch it? “Since ‘western medicine’ doesn’t really have a clue … I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities.” “My fail-safe maneuver.” “The spiritual community of ‘medicine.’” “It is reputed to help.” Medicine wasn’t working out for this person, so they figured they might as well try alternative medicine as a backup. This is an attitude I’ve grown accustomed to hearing, but the frequency with which it’s repeated doesn’t make it any easier to comprehend or any more pleasant.
I think it was Tim Minchin who said it best: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” These “non-Western modalities,” so appealing to our (misguided) sense of reverence toward any and all ancient wisdom, are all things that haven’t been proved to work, or have been proved not to work. Let’s take a look, shall we?
- Acupuncture: Sticking little needles all over the body at particular points, believed to heal a wide variety of ailments by manipulating “qi” or “energy flow” in some vague, magical way. It turns out that merely pretending to give someone acupuncture has equal, if not greater, healing power. Hmm.
- Chinese herbs: This is pretty nonspecific. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of herbs that do have curative effects, and many of the ones we know about have been used in actual medicines, but the simple fact that something is an herb doesn’t make it healthy by definition. The fetishization of eastern/Chinese wisdom doesn’t make an herb curative, either.
- Homeopathy: I, too, used to think that “homeopathy” was a synonym for “natural remedy.” But it turns out that it’s based such blatant magical thinking, it’s shocking that any generally sane person could buy into this scam. Homeopaths believe that the more dilute something is, the more powerful it is, so they dilute their “medicines” far beyond the point where a single molecule of the “active ingredient” would even be present in the solution. And about that active ingredient — they believe that “like cures like,” so to treat a symptom you should take something which would cause that symptom. Luckily (I guess), they dilute it into nonexistence first.
- Bio-energy balancing: What does this even mean? What is “bio-energy,” and how might an “imbalance” of it relate to peripheral neuropathy? This is just a nonsense phrase, an attempt to sound scientific and convince gullible people to open their wallets.
- Lourdes: I can only hope these last two were offered tongue-in-cheek. The shrine at Lourdes is about as credible a source of miracles as a burnt grilled cheese sandwich.
- John of God: This guy is a con artist. Perhaps he’s fooled himself too, but when you get right down to it he performs carnival tricks and scams people out of their money. Not a very good “fail-safe maneuver,” if your definition of “fail” is anything like mine.
Interestingly, the anonymous email-writer acknowledged the effectiveness of these alternative treatments: “Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining.” I’d chalk “not entirely no dice” up to the placebo effect, given the list that was offered and what we know about those “modalities” from scientific investigations.
I understand that people with long-lasting, painful medical conditions want some way to make themselves better. However, wanting something doesn’t make it so. The popular notion that “alternative medicine” is worth a try when you’re in dire straits can definitely be harmful. It distracts people from, and sometimes interferes with, proven science-based medical treatments. It wastes people’s time and money. In the rare cases where “alternative medicine” is not just a modern-day version of dancing around a bonfire or sacrificing a goat, where it has some actual direct physical effect, it can be very dangerous — because it isn’t regulated, hasn’t been adequately tested, and is not well-understood.
What about psilocybin? I admit I don’t have the scientific background to have an educated opinion. Perhaps it could be used for some valid treatments; our current legal framework might be constraining adequate research into these possibilities. What I can say with more certainty is that the attitude so perfectly encapsulated here — in which treatments which are “non-Western,” “spiritual,” or endorsed by “folks” in developing countries are given privileged status over evidence-based medicine — is what motivated this writer to try it. And that attitude is dangerous.
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