This isn’t directly about Medicare, BUT, businesses are ALWAYS being created and destroyed. For example: Zoom has conquered the COVID-19 era, but during the Spanish flu, the biggest disruptor was Dixie cups. When the brand first launched in 1907, it went by the moniker “Health Kup.” Few people bought in, preferring glass and metal cups, not paper ones.
But when the flu hit in 1918, the company pivoted. Dixie cups changed its name and pitched itself as the sanitary alternative to drinking vessels like communal metal cups. Pretty soon, its paper cups were everywhere. We will continue to see this process repeat itself over and over…
Why We Fall For Scams; Click this link to check out the full article about Medicare and Social Security scams. A pithy part is below: …There’s still something I can’t shake: how could my dad — a highly intelligent, cautious person — fall for something that sounds like a bad movie script? The answers lie in the social psychology of persuasion.
In attempting to persuade another person to do something — fall for a scam, buy a product, win an argument — an individual typically takes one of two routes that mirror Aristotle’s artistic proofs:
- A central route to persuasion that employs logic and critical thinking.
- A peripheral route to persuasion that preys on emotion and employs “mental shortcuts to bypass logical argument.”
Scammers use the latter of the two, often starting the conversation off with a series of accusations that invoke panic and fear.
“These surges of strong emotion serve to interfere with the victim’s ability to call on his or her capacity for logical thinking, such as his capacity for counterargument,” writes Jonathan Rusch, a legal scholar who spent 27 years working on fraud cases at the DOJ.
Once the scammer has paralyzed a victim with fear, he will offer up a solution to the nonexistent problem he invented. After being threatened with criminal charges and potential bankruptcy, a few thousand dollars in gift cards seems more palatable.
A scammer will also constantly remind a victim of his authority, and endorse it with supplementary details…
