{"id":4689,"date":"2012-07-06T06:12:08","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T12:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4689"},"modified":"2012-07-06T06:12:08","modified_gmt":"2012-07-06T12:12:08","slug":"dead-peasants-insurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4689","title":{"rendered":"Dead Peasants Insurance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/m.guardian.co.uk\/books\/2012\/may\/17\/what-money-cant-buy-michael-sandel-review?cat=books&#038;type=article\">John Lanchester<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;Dead peasants insurance&#8221; is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true. Here&#8217;s an example of what it means: in 1999, Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. He died a week later, and an insurance company paid out $300,000 for the loss of his life.<br \/>\nSo far, a sad but not unusual story; the twist was in the identity of the people who benefited from the insurance. It wasn&#8217;t Rice&#8217;s family, who didn&#8217;t get a penny, but Walmart. In a subsequent lawsuit, it turned out that Walmart had hundreds of thousands of such policies on employees, so every time one of them died, the huge corporation enjoyed a tiny windfall. And that&#8217;s dead peasants insurance, or, as it is also known, &#8220;janitors insurance&#8221;. They are forms of what the insurance industry calls Stoli, or &#8220;stranger originated life insurance&#8221; \u2013 in other words, an insurance policy taken out on your life by someone else, not on your behalf but on theirs.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Lanchester: &#8220;Dead peasants insurance&#8221; is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true. Here&#8217;s an example of what it means: in 1999, Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. He [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}