According to Harvard Medical School researchers, 11 large companies that offer life, disability, or health insurance owned about $1.9 billion in stock in the five largest fast-food companies as of June 2009.
The fast-food companies included McDonald’s, Burger King, and Yum! Brands (the parent company of KFC and Taco Bell). Companies from both North America and Europe were among the insurers, including the U.S.-based Massachusetts Mutual, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential Financial.
The researchers contributing to the last Motley Fool review say insurance companies should sell their fast-food stock or use their influence as shareholders to make fast food healthier, by pressuring big restaurant chains to cut portion sizes or improve nutrition, for instance.
There’s a “potential disconnect” between the mission of insurance companies and the often-unhealthy food churned out by companies like McDonald’s, they write.
“The insurance industry cares about making money, and it doesn’t really care how,” says the senior author of the study, J. Wesley Boyd, M.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. “They will invest in products that contribute to significant morbidity and mortality if doing so is going to make money.”
Makes perfect sense to me.
This makes me feel really good about eating right and giving up sugary drinks. Just my way of sticking it to the man. Frack you so very much insurance companies.
You can buy pizza from a vending machine?
EWWWW!
Maybe insurance companies should only invest in money-losing, but liberal nanny approved, businesses like organic, karma-enhanced tofu, instead of making investments that actually have a profit?
Is there ANY sanity left at Harvard?
@McCullogh Perfect sense? For what – losing money? It is imperative of a free business to balance its own risks. “Unhealthy” food vendors are perfect counter-balance for the health insurance. If people eat well, their primary business will do well. If people eat junk, their investment will do well. Hence they’ll prosper regardless the personal health choice of the public (which is personal choice of every person and should always be so). Those are their risks and balances. Your own private health risk balance is up to you.
Actually, stocks in fast food joints and any other such “comfort foods” are exactly what you SHOULD buy into whenever society is in a period of psychological depression.
Marketing 101:
Step 1: Create a problem.
Step 2: Sell the solution
They are simply making sure step 1 is taken care of.
#6. Applies to politics as well.
…an interesting article
Is anyone entertaining the thought that corporations are ethical or have your best interests at heart?
If you are, please stop. You are only lying to yourself.
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In business school, this is called a form a vertical integration.
So the connotation is that hedging their losses by profiting of the the products that are likely to increase their insurance expenses is a bad thing, yes?
But if the federal government were to tax those same products to pay for its insurance expenses, then, magically, it is a good thing, right?
Ironic that the pizza vending machine deploys a product called ‘tombstone’. Maybe it just kills you right there and then to save on the healthcare costs of eating its pizza.
Isn’t it in the insurance company’s best interest to NOT have a claim to pay? So, an insurance company actually wants you to live as long as possible and never get sick.
Of course the media will have you believe they are evil incarnate (now that Exxon Mobil isn’t the #1 boogie man now).
On one end this is a pretty slick business model.
On the other end, just because the insurance companies CAN legally do this doesn’t mean they SHOULD. It’s bad PR.