funwhilelost

Thanks for sharing this extra detail. Your industry is obviously much trickier to navigate than the service industry our worker co-op is in.

Do your members get any voting rights or other feedback mechanisms?

That's not entirely true. There have been a number of innovations in cooperative structures. For instance, many cooperatives need capital to get off the ground, or they're a capital intensive industry like insurance, and they'll introduce capital investors but they don't get voting rights.

It's not all that different than taking a business loan which requires repayment of the capital - but the bank doesn't have voting rights and doesn't attend board meetings.

I'm curious to hear more about Goodcover's structure, too, like what rights do members have beyond dividend returns. I've, personally, always thought that my needs from insurance companies are significantly lower than many peoples. The thread below about 4+ years of expenses paid absolutely blows my mind. I would _never_ expect my insurance company to do that and I'd hope to get proportionally lower premiums.

My hope for the proliferation of cooperatives is to provide more diverse offerings in every industry and combat the consolidation that we're seeing everywhere. That said, I understand that the insurance industry is under a tremendous amount of regulation (for good reason) and I might make bad choices as a consumer.

One of the other perks of cooperatives is their commitment to benefiting members which could include much better education and support around policy options.