The New York Attorney General's Controversial Suit Against the Insurance Industry:
Why Claims Eliot Spitzer Is Overreaching Are Wrong
By ANTHONY J. SEBOK

"After taking on the mutual fund industry, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is now setting his sights on the insurance industry...at a news conference, he announced he had found wide-spread wrongdoing..."

Beyond Controversy

by Antone P. Braga

I agree with Sebok's basic point that Attorney Generals' prime responsibility is to protect the public interest, although many do not take the lead in that area. Essentially Spitzer focuses his case on kickbacks from the companies to the brokers that raise the cost of insurance and it begs the question of conflict of interest as to protecting the public. This has sparked a controversy concerning whether he is overreaching, never mind it is far from the import of another compelling conflict of interest case left untouched. It is something so egregious that it hardly seems possible, yet is widely accepted:

How is a public protected when routinely denied basic information and rights, and, when insurance commonly states it represents that public, when in fact it does not?

Nowhere else in our society do we tolerate anyone representing both sides in any one transaction or contract. Why is it so difficult for people to come to grips with the obvious? In two words: indoctrination, assumption.

As each generation lives through the immense barrage of one sided advertising paid for from policyholder premiums, directly raising the cost of insurance, a deeper misunderstanding is passed on to the next and to the next. There is little shelter, the attack comes from all sides. And, it affects us all, including even attorney generals, and for that matter supreme court justices or any other high ranking member of society. From the bottom to the top, we are saturated and impregnated with the selective dogma. So, it is no real surprise that attorney generals, insurance commissioners and just about everyone else turn a blind eye to the larger issue.

It is nearly impossible to seek out satisfying a need you think does not exist: even footing—you don't know you need it till too late when you do.

And so, it is a rare individual who is willing and able to search out and comprehend something so foreign yet basic and intrinsic to everyone: our trampled rights and loss of our individual authority. Though, now comes a new time of awareness and a tide of enlightenment for us all.

The Primrose Path, a verse

As nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON