Open Source: Zombie Out Break Essay with Respect to Life Insurance policies

This is not my work. I found it open sourced

http://www.archive.org/details/ZombieOutbreak

I posted because I thought it humorous. If site owners are uncomfortable, we can take it down.

Zombie Outbreak Causes Actuarial Anomaly

(Cleveland, Reuters’s, 3/11/08)

Author: Tom Schryer

Keywords: zombies actuary insurance comedy

Collection: opensource

The recent events in Louisville (yet again) and the subsequent lawsuit McCafferty v Great Monument Mutual Insurance have caused an actuary to conclude that there is a negative probability of death at some ages.

The recent dramatic outbreak of zombies that started in Louisville and spread across most of the Northern Hemisphere was yet another reminder that your resurrection might not have to happen in heaven. We all recall the gruesome and inconceivable scenes on all the networks showing nearly 2 million of our former citizens traumatized and traumatizing.

Unless you were paying close attention to legal journals you probably missed McCafferty v Great Monument Mutual Insurance. That twisted bit of lawyering and counter-lawyering was decided by the Supreme Court last week in favor of a little-known regional insurance company.

It turns out the big fish in the life insurance pond were highly involved and many families are receiving some very bad news indeed. Not only were the resting places of their loved ones disturbed but 1) they are not going to get the remains back and 2) they will have to repay life insurance claims, with interest. Actually, it gets even worse.

Let’s back up to the latest reverse grave-digging episode. Deke McCafferty was your Joe Sixpack kind of guy and his liver gave out on him in 1997. Sad. Then came the atomized 2-4-5 trioxin delivery dreamed up by inmates at a loony bin in – ta da! – Louisville in 2008. One of those whose eternal sleep was interrupted was one Deke McCafferty, late of Louisville’s finest watering holes. Deke and 2 million of his closest friends were charmed into an impromptu and synchronized resurrection ballet. We all applauded a prompt and efficient gathering process that was privately funded – saving us taxpaying schmucks a bundle.

Those reanimated brethren were all de-activated by chemicals discovered since the prior zombification breakouts – and stockpiled. It turns out that the neutralizing chemicals were 1) stockpiled by a consortium of life insurance companies, 2) deployed in a fleet of vehicles leased by that consortium, and 3) the “proceeds” were deposited in Montana.

It gets weirder.

It turns out that the consortium was given full and utter re-disposal rights everywhere. It also turns out that they had discovered that de-humanized hulks remained lethargic but decidedly “alive” by legal standards with almost no maintenance costs.

Send postcards to your departed Aunt Edna c/o Fair Bluffs, Montana. She can convey any messages you have for McCafferty at the same address too.

Enter tiny Great Monument Mutual Insurance’s lawsuit in Billings Montana about a year ago. It successfully claimed that good ol’ Deke was no longer deceased and that they will be happy pay his eventual life insurance claim when he re-deceases (they actually had this new word in their brief). In the meantime, they would “honor” the life insurance contract by retrieving the claim paid earlier, with interest, and - get this chutzpah – retrieve premiums back to when they lapsed before. Of course, future premiums must be made if the policy is to be kept in-force.

On the very day of the Supreme Court’s decision all the country’s life insurance companies immediately made such fully perfected claims.

These reverse entries in national mortality statistics flowed through the government’s computers and plopped themselves down in the coziest way imaginable at an actuary’s desk for usage in a quarterly report on “trends in mortality.”

Guess what: for many age groups – according this rocket science – you have a negative probability of checking out of the Hotel of the Living in the next year. Our re-animated friends and relatives were logged as negative deaths by the life insurance companies. Hey, the media get a collective bad rap for twisted reportage but we swear that we didn’t make this up! We would have mind you but fact remains decidedly stranger than fiction, for reasons made starkly clear in this set of “facts.”

The next time you meet that spacey gal who writes short stories, or even a Hollywood Screenwriter’s Guild member, ask if they can top the creative prose of those eternal wallflowers: math-geek actuaries.