The Utah insurance commissioner has penalized a
startup, Zenefits, for offering free access to a portion of its website that
offers health (and probably life) insurance as an employee benefit. Presumably employees and employers could
avoid dealing with agents who operate in a more conventional way.
Regulators say that it is against Utah law to offer “inducements”
to purchase insurance. So apparently it
would be legal in Utah for employees to work only through their employer’s
human resources to purchase insurance. I
once worked on a salary deduction system for employee insurance benefits in the
1990s, so I know how the process works pretty well (from supporting the system for
three years).
There’s another context in which the story is
disturbing. A lot of “novices” offer content for “free”, and sometimes older
companies look at this as threatening.
There were a few trademark suits over domain names before 2000 from companies
that had not yet set up their own websites to grab the domain names. They weren’t with it enough to do this. News
business and media may feel some pressure from “amateur” bloggers who get
stores before they do. Movie studios
could feel undercut by indie films with no budgets, as much as they are hurt by
piracy. But in the movie industry, there
are actual SAG rules that control how actors work in lower budget films.
The Utah news story by Timothy B Lee is on Vox, here. Vox, as I’ve noted, has an interesting
approach to “categorizing the news” (especially in its yellow-banner “card
stacks”) so that readers are made more aware of lesser understood arguments on
controversial or polarizing issues.
What is in life is still "free"?
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