Abstract

"Cash and Carry" Life Insurance

Life insurance in the U.S. has passed the hundred-billion mark. This event is receiving the applause which Americans are always ready to give to evidences of their giantism. That it is an achievement and a milestone on the road to economic security, no one would deny, but let us at the same time not forget that commercial life insurance has still a few blots on its escutcheon. In 1908 the status of industrial insurance was even less promising. In that year the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law permitting savings banks to write life-insurance policies and old-age annuities. This plan originated with Louis D. Brandeis, then a practicing lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts who had undergone a baptism of fire on the subject of insurance in the investigation of certain scandalous practices of life insurance companies, practices now happily abandoned.