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Yea they are. They guarantee interest rates and payout based on the pool of premiums. Isn't that essentially what a Ponzi scheme is?
Tiber's right, you don't think at all do you?
The guaranteed interest rate is not created by getting more people to join the scheme, which is how a ponzi works to guarantee a return to the initial investors. It is created by actual investments in the general economy, bonds, stocks, etc. If you are saying an insurance company is a scam, then so are savings accounts by your logic. Another crucial difference: most insurance companies have been running this "scam" for over a hundred years. And almost all of the time, people don't have a big problem getting their money back when they have a claim. A ponzi, good luck getting anything back.
That is not to say there are not bad insurers or forms of insurance which are less useful or less economically sound. But on the level, insurance as the concept is a good idea necessary for a modern economy to function. A ponzi scheme is fraud. Comparing these two things is asinine.
Not all insurance products invest in the market.
Most of them don't, no, nor did I claim that they do. If you mean stocks at least. Besides which, whether or not the insurance product invests your own money directly as a function of its very existence in the stock market, like say a variable annuity or a variable life insurance contract has little to do with what the insurance company at large does with the money that you pay for premiums and the like. Some of that money is, in fact, invested in stocks or other securities. Banking industry as a whole operates by taking your money that you give them as deposits or premiums and using it to make money. It doesn't just sit there.
That point still doesn't somehow demonstrate that they are ponzi schemes. It mostly demonstrates that you have no idea how insurance works. Or what a ponzi scheme is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
Insurance companies do not vanish with all of the premiums paid in. Those that do often have their contracts, if legally made, taken over by other firms because insurance contracts are usually profitable arrangements for both buyer and seller. As a further problem, insurance usually guarantees rates of return that are lower than what you might be able to get in the stock market or elsewhere, in exchange for guaranteeing a particular sum of money or a promise to pay if a catastrophic event occurs (car accident, house burns down, breadwinner dies prematurely).
That's hardly very enticing economically in the manner of a get rich quick ponzi.