Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

Excellent. I hope this is the first of several CEOs to lose their jobs over a lackadaisical approach to following the law. I cannot stand the attitude that several of the most "successful" startups follow that laws are just barriers to profit, and I think more CEOs (and investors) should be held accountable for blatantly ignoring these laws on their way to many billions of dollars.

Uber, Airbnb and Theranos come to mind first. As much as I want to see the daily fantasy sports put out of business, they at least had the foresight to punch a legal hole in the system to try to create a business (and not to mention they seem to be in the death throes anyhow).

It bothers me that investors seem to be so nonchalant about investing in a business that is in very questionable legal circumstances. I don't really know how to solve it, but it feels like investors do their due diligence (I hope!), but figure that the legal system is slow so there's a good chance that they can exit before any legal ramifications kick in.

I dunno - I think of it as testing the law. If they didn't try, nothing would change.

And selling insurance without a license? If it was just flouting protectionist laws I'm all in favor. So many regulations are about keeping some lobby profitable, and not protecting the public.

Is the place to test the law in the marketplace, or in court? It's fairly easy for startups to argue the case that "the government is keeping you down", especially when their very existence depends on that argument. But there is also generally a flip-side to the argument as well. In Airbnb's case, zoning laws, insurance requirements and such are all in place not to protect the interests of Marriott (at least not entirely); they exist because populations as a whole want them to exist.

Making sure Grandma actually has the life and health insurance products you claimed to sell her (or, more likely, told her where the right products for her), is a lot more than keeping "some lobby" profitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

There's no reason to simply sell insurance you should need to be licensed. Now to PROVIDE insurance, sure.

Just another stupid overreach IMO. Exactly the same as Uber/AirBnB/etc.

The reason to require a license to sell insurance is that it's a complicated product and most people don't know enough about it to make appropriate decisions on their own. You want to make sure the people selling it are both informed enough to give their clients the right information and also not crooks.

Really? Because you can select it through ACA without talking to as single person. But, it's SOOOOO complicated you need a license to sell it.

Cars are complicated too, why don't their salespeople need a license?

Using healthcare.gov might not have been the best example of health care's simplicity, considering its estimated size is hundreds of million of lines of code and cost tens of millions of dollars. The process may be easy for the consumer, but it's obviously much harder in the backend.

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