Daily Inspiration Quote by Gerry Spence

Spence’s line lands like a courtroom turn: a simple inversion that makes the listener feel the scam in their bones. “Reverse the business” isn’t just critique, it’s a dare to look at the plumbing. Insurance is sold as a shield against catastrophe, a private safety net you pay into so you’re not ruined by one bad day. Spence flips that story and suggests the real product is corporate risk offloading: deductibles, co-pays, exclusions, prior authorizations, rescission, arbitration clauses, claim denials dressed up as “utilization management.” The public keeps paying premiums and then, when the moment of need arrives, is asked to absorb more cost, more delay, more paperwork. The company’s exposure shrinks; the consumer’s grows.

The subtext is populist and prosecutorial. By casting “the public at large” as the insurer, Spence frames insurance not as a market transaction but as a moral breach: a promise engineered to fail. It’s also a precise indictment of asymmetric power. Insurers write the rules, control the data, hire the experts, and can outlast individuals financially. People aren’t just buying coverage; they’re underwriting an institution built to fight them.

Context matters: Spence built a career as a trial lawyer and consumer advocate in an era when “tort reform” campaigns and health insurance battles painted plaintiffs as opportunists and corporations as victims. His rhetoric reassigns victimhood. The genius is the compression: one sentence turns a contractual relationship into a political one, making insurance sound less like protection and more like a toll paid to keep insurers safe from the very risk they monetize.