Ok, so I knew most insurance companys were evil. I did some work a few years ago for one of the big ones (Hint: It's in Bloomington, IL), so I saw first-hand what kind of fartknockers they could be. This story has to take the cake, though. I don't claim to be a math whiz, and anyone is welcome to rebut this, but I don't seem to recall any stories of the insurance industry having any troubles making money the previous couple of hundred years using basic actuarial tables. Maybe the information explosion is actually damaging them. They're using the massive amounts of data they collect to cut their margins so thin that a few good round of claims can put a serious hurting on them. Now they're turning their relationship with their customers into even more of an adversarial one.