Perry Sought State Profits From Teacher Life Insurance Schem

No, THIS is "dirty laundry".......

Rick Perry Sought State Profits From Teacher Life Insurance Scheme

WASHINGTON -- Two weeks before Thanksgiving in 2003, top officials from Texas Governor Rick Perry's office pitched an unusual offer to the state's retired teachers: Let's get into the death business.

Perry's budget director, Mike Morrissey, laid out a pitch that was both ambitious and risky, according to notes summarizing the meeting provided to The Huffington Post.

According to the notes, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation.

All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them. When the retirees died, those policies would pay out benefits to Wall Street speculators, and the state, supposedly, would get paid for arranging the bets. The families of the deceased former teachers would get nothing.

The meeting notes offer the most direct evidence that the Perry administration was not only intimately involved with the insurance scheme, but a leading driver of the plan.

It was a back-room deal at odds with Perry's public persona as a career politician who had successfully sold Texans on his vision of minimal government intrusion. And it still is. Nearly eight years after the meeting, when Perry formally announced his run for the presidency in Charleston, S.C., he honed that vision into the perfect applause line: "I'll promise you this," he had said in his West Texas drawl. "I'll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/2 ... 35666.html

Yeah... "The Man With The Plan"....

And there's one thing for sure...The sociopaths on 285B will think this is a great idea...

[crickets chirping from the Righties]

I thought you couldn't take out insurance on someone unless there was a family connection.

I know they wouldn't let me buy a life insurance policy on Amy Winehouse last month.

You also thought that someone making $20,000/year got the same Social Security Benefit as someone making $100,000..... Hmmmmmm

Corporations do it all the time...Take out insurance policies on key personnel that make the company the beneficiary. This is basically no different. You can insure anyone or anything if you can find someone to "take the bet."

SS109 wrote: I thought you couldn't take out insurance on someone unless there was a family connection.

You don't have to be family, just have the insured's permission.....Sounds from the article that was what Perry was looking for,

All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them.

SS109 wrote: I thought you couldn't take out insurance on someone unless there was a family connection.

I know they wouldn't let me buy a life insurance policy on Amy Winehouse last month.

I never understood that regulation.
I had a boss many years ago that when we flew for business, would toss 2 bucks and say"buy some flight insurance for me maybe I'll get lucky" He just ended up buying a drink at the airport.

LadyJazzer wrote: You also thought that someone making $20,000/year got the same Social Security Benefit as someone making $100,000..... Hmmmmmm

Corporations do it all the time...Take out insurance policies on key personnel that make the company the beneficiary. This is basically no different. You can insure anyone or anything if you can find someone to "take the bet."

Wasn't there a Rev. in Aurora who was doing the same thing to his parishoners?

And while the 100K guy does get more benefits than the 20K guy, it isn't 5X the benefits.

SS109 wrote: And while the 100K guy does get more benefits than the 20K guy, it isn't 5X the benefits.

No one said it was... So, what's your point?

Death in Texas, on the other hand, is another matter. That first meeting with teacher groups and retirement plan officials in November 2003, recalled one attendee, was an effort by Perry's office to solicit support for the life insurance idea from teacher associations. There was little question who was promoting the plan.

"His office was pushing it," the source said. "It was like, 'We've got to do whatever we can. ... Here's an innovative idea. We really want you on board.'"

The governor's office was even prepared to put down a little cash up front. If retirees balked at the notion of the state profiting from their deaths, Perry's budget men suggested they could be persuaded for the cost of a pair of shoes, according to the meeting notes. If a retiree signed a contract allowing the state's teacher pension fund to buy life insurance on them, the governor was prepared to give them between $50 and $100.

"Precious little for what they were giving up," said the meeting attendee.

The notes make clear that the governor's proposal deliberately targeted the elderly. The state was only seeking to take out life insurance on people between the ages of 75 and 90. At a separate meeting five days later, the plan's proponents discussed the "mental capacity" of these retirees to grant consent as one of three major technical obstacles to the plan, according to notes from that meeting.

At the first meeting, Morrissey said it could take 10 to 12 years for Texas to "earn" money from the scheme, but insisted the deal could be worth up to $700 million for the state if the retirement fund could sign up 40,000 retired teachers.

The meeting notes show Insurance Commissioner Jose Montemayor, a Perry appointee, joined Morrissey in the sales pitch, claiming that "this arrangement" was already being utilized by "some very rich people" who had set up similar plans to benefit the University of Texas and Texas A&M.

"It was a pretty hard sell: 'This is something you need to get on board with,'" the source said, paraphrasing officials' comments at the meeting.

The source says the claim involving a similar program benefiting the Texas universities turned out to be untrue -- the "rich people" had taken out the policies themselves with the intent of sharing any life insurance payments with the universities. Montemayor, as insurance commissioner, would have had to waive "insurable interest" regulations to allow the schools to buy life insurance on their professors. There is no public record that he did so. The University of Texas and Texas A&M did not return requests for comment.

Slimebag....

You can hear the surprise in *MY* voice.... :VeryScared:

Wow, the leftist guerrillas are really ignorant - betting on death of individual by an insurance company is called an annuity. Funny how the writer didn't call the product by the real name.

Another liberal rage based upon ignorance....not surprising.