Without thousands of lobbyist and millions of dollars per year in campaign contributions, insurance companies would be shut down and their executives would be jailed and as notorious as characters like Al Capone and John Gotti.

Here are a few things that Insurance companies do everyday and get away with: loan sharking, discrimination, gambling, and anti-trust.

Under the guise of actuarial science, they have made discrimination a science. And it is the worst kind of discrimination because if you have a set of attributes and one of those attributes puts you in a "high risk"(that's insurance speak for undesirable) category, it does not matter that your other attributes make you low risk. Insurance companies generalize you and classify your risk based on your most damaging attribute no matter how insignificant it seems.

If you were to wreck your car and amass 00 in damage, first you are paid everything but the deductible, then your premiums go up sometimes as much as the payout was per year. That is equivalent to a loan with a 100% APR that you cannot pay off. That is loan sharking.