Doing the Minimum

It’s disappointing when doing the minimum one needs to do to get paid, and reliance on the insurance industry to pick up the slack when one fails to do even that, becomes normal. But it’s worse when, rather than showing the moral courage and owning up to it, one uses lies, rudeness and offences to cover up one’s incompetencies.

Doctors need to have skills greater than the sum of the books they’ve read. Even a simple computer program can look up diagnoses and prescribe medication per established protocol by following a flowchart; and AI can probably do better than most consulting doctors. I came across an elderly person who lost the use of his legs because five doctors all came up with the same wrong diagnosis. It seems that either their need to respect each other’s professional opinions exceeded the need to correctly diagnose the patient’s health or they were all equally incompetent and looking up the same book.

Lawyers take on more and more business while actually doing less and less work, most of which is delegated to law clerks who in turn do the same, due to the safety net of making the client pay for insurance, so if anything goes wrong in a transaction, including due to their incompetency, they are not only safe, but actually get paid by insurance for more of their billable hours for filing the claim for the client to get reimbursed.

Banks are similar. They actually do not check the signatures on cheques under $1,500 due to the volume of cheques. If they do wrongly pay out a cheque, and provided the client notices, they have 30 days to recall the funds they incorrectly paid out (if it was to another bank), failing which there’s insurance to reimburse the client.

Insurance brokers make a killing on fear mongering, like there isn’t enough of it already. First pay premiums to cover the various risks, then not file a claim in the event of a loss, so as not to risk being dropped by the underwriter for filing the claim. Because being dropped by the underwriter would end the recurring revenue stream for doing pretty much nothing after first raking in the client.

“Professional” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in almost every context. Everyone considers themselves a “professional” in the sense that they are highly skilled at their craft and conduct themselves in a commensurate and ethical manner. To me that word simply means a person who charges money (as opposed to amateur) for whatever they have managed to make a go of in their lives.

I could go on and on – from people offering to help (for a fee, of course) to so-called “professionals” and businesses, everyone seems to be in a race against time to amass as much money as possible while doing the bare minimum possible.

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