THE FASCINATING WORLD OF INSURANCE

My insurance broker was explaining the hierarchy of insurance entities to me. You might think insurance is pretty simple, like there's just this company you pay in exchange for them promising to come save you if something bad happens. But it's soooo much more complicated than that.

There's a general master agent, a health trust (and the association sponsoring the trust), the insurance carrier, probably a third-party administrator (for enrollments, COBRA, billing to groups, etc.), then a broker and a producer.

This was my reply to his email:

Man, that's a lot of people with their fingers in the pie. Thank you for the explanation. Every time I learn more about insurance I'm surprised to see how complex it is. For something that's fundamentally just a wager on whether or not something bad will happen, so many people have put so much effort into it. It's like uncertainty and ignorance are these infinitely deep cracks that people squeeze into with force proportional to their ambition.