Most Annoying Holiday Commercial

[thongd4me 69]

The URL was too long to put in a "YouTube" so you have to click on this -

Cure Bad Breath

[thongd4me 69]

[NickD 203]

No examples, but find some of those drug company commercials to be very nauseating about people going to the bathroom in their pants. Others make me a hypochondriac thinking I have some strange unknown disease, and had it with GIECO. How come we don't have any super competitive healthcare insurance commercials?

[thongd4me 69]

No examples, but find some of those drug company commercials to be very nauseating about people going to the bathroom in their pants. Others make me a hypochondriac thinking I have some strange unknown disease, and had it with GIECO. How come we don't have any super competitive healthcare insurance commercials?

From the mouth of Buffet himself - it's all about the "FLOAT"

The Power of Float

The source of our insurance funds is "float," which is money that doesn't belong to us but that we temporarily hold. Most of our float arises because (1) premiums are paid upfront though the service we provide - insurance protection - is delivered over a period that usually covers a year and; (2) loss events that occur today do not always result in our immediately paying claims, because it sometimes takes many years for losses to be reported (asbestos losses would be an example), negotiated and settled. The $20 million of float that came with our 1967 purchase (National Indemnity- NICO) has now increased - both by way of internal growth and acquisitions - to $46.1 billion.

Float is wonderful - if it doesn't come at a high price. Its cost is determined by underwriting results, meaning how the expenses and losses we will ultimately pay compare with the premiums we have received. When an underwriting profit is achieved - as has been the case at Berkshire in about half of the 38 years we have been in the insurance business - float is better than free. In such years, we are actually paid for holding other people's money. For most insurers, however, life has been far more difficult: In aggregate, the property-casualty industry almost invariably operates at an underwriting loss. When that loss is large, float becomes expensive, sometimes devastatingly so.