• U.S.

Radio: Insurance Aired

3 minute read
TIME

Most U. S. families carry some sort of insurance, and most of them have radios. Their insurance policies are generally Greek to them. But what comes over the radio is easy to understand. Recently, over WMCA and several other Manhattan and New England stations, the radio has been bringing to many homes in the East disturbing theories about insurance policies. Sample script:

BANG! BANG! BANG! (revolver shots), “Racket! Racket! Racket! . . . You have been taken for a ride and don’t know it. . . . Forced to pay hard-earned pennies for something that can be bought for half. . . . I want to help you stop being a victim of this racket. . . . If anyone tells you not to come and see me and learn how I can save you money, then that person is protecting his own interests. He is in cahoots with the billion-dollar insurance companies.”

The chief bang-bang-bang artist is an insurance counselor named Donald Besdine, who broadcasts 55 times a week, in person and by transcription. But the arch radio-counselor of them all (in Manhattan there are some half dozen on the air) is a cagey, kinky-haired, 38-year-old ex-insurance man named Morris H. Siegel (M. H. to his 52 aides). Into M. H.’s Manhattan and Boston offices (Policyholders’ Advisory Council) last year ventured some 40,000 persons with real or fancied insurance problems. Each of them paid $1 for the interview. Some 8,000 became clients—i. e., had their policies cashed or converted and cheaper insurance substituted, sometimes with a spot of recovered cash to boot. For these services, Siegel exacts an average fee of $25. Non-profit consumer groups also engaged in insurance counsel say the average case can be handled for $3. Out of his whopping annual take, some $250,000, Siegel paid a radio bill last year of $100,000 for time on ten local and four New England stations.

Siegel’s points of issue with the insurance companies have been argued for years in actuarial journals and insurance columns in the press. Immediate question the counselors all raise is: how honest an adviser is an insurance agent whose livelihood is derived from commissions on sales?

The Siegel side of the insurance question is considered dynamite by the major networks, but last week Prudential and Metropolitan, the biggest two insurance companies in the U. S., were on the big time air with their side of the story. Their main point: the company agent’s functions are so ordered that the best interests of the policyholders must be the agent’s, too. Prudential began a five-a-week non-insurance dramatic serial over CBS, called When a Girl Marries, which contents itself with simple commercial testaments to the agent’s integrity.

Metropolitan, already suing WMCA for letting Besdine and Siegel broadcast their stuff, set about dramatizing stories of policyholders who claim to have been victimized by radio insurance counselors. “And, when you finally ask your agent,” Commentator Edwin C. Hill tells the radio audience as the episode closes, “you learn you could have gotten that service—without paying a fee—just by consulting your own life insurance agent.”

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