In this post, we will highlight the plight of businessman Mr Amirul, who is faced with claims of $18,000 for a small carpark bump in which his own repair for his Toyota Wish is only $650! We have done an interview and will unfold the events that occurred, resulting in this exhorbitant claim, and how you can PROTECT yourself against unscrupulous people who have no qualms about taking advantage of the complicated system to benefit themselves and passing on the cost of insurance to you:

The accident occurred on 5th Nov 07, when Mr Amirul was reversing his Toyota Wish, from the left of the picture, into an area which resemble a delivery ramp (Refer to Picture A). At the same time, the insurance agent was coming from behind and thus the accident occurred.

The Toyota Wish was hit from the back of his vehicle as shown in the next picture, while the insurance agent's Nissan Sunny was hit at the right side of his car during the accident. In Singapore, the car that knocks the behind of the car in front is generally at fault, but in this case, both parties seem to share a fair share of fault.

Immediately after the accident, the Insurance agent came out of his vehicle, bend down to look at the damages, walked to his car boot, opened up his briefcase and took out a piece of paper.  He wrote a note explicitly stating Mr Amirul was at fault and asked Mr Amirul to sign which of course he did not.  Mr Amirul disagreed that he was responsible for the accident but acknowledged that the accident did occur.  The insurance agent wrote another note of acknowledgement that accident did occur and he claimed that it was for insurance claim and no lawyers involved.  As Mr Amirul does not want to cause any obstruction to other vehicle along the driveway and the insurance agent 'appeared' to be very honest and sincere (he even offered to give Mr Amirul a better deal in his next insurance renewal and given his name card; AIG Insurance agent).They had the agreement that no lawyers will be involved and they will let the insurance settle the small accident as they assumed that damages would be limited only to a few hundred dollars, as shown by the pictures ( by the way those were the exact original pictures taken at the point of accident).  At the point of accident, nobody was injured, including Mr Amirul's 77 year old mother-in-law and 17 year old son who was sitted behind. Both parties then agreed to make report to IDAC separately.  As for Mr Amirul he drove and proceeded to Paya Ubi IDAC straight away to do the necessary report, but according to the Amiruls, NO PHOTOGRAPHS were taken when their car was there.

A few weeks later in Dec 07, Mr Amirul received a lawyer's letter demanding claims of $4672.  And fast forward 3 months on 6 March 2008, Mr Amirul received a letter from NTUC Income for injury claim of $13,070!  The injury claim was in respect of injury sustained by the insurance agent as a result of the minor accident.  The insurance agent had gone to the Department of Emergency of Alexandra Hospital in the evening of the same day of the accident.  In his medical report it was stated that he was 'hit by a reversing car on the front of the door and subsequently developed cervical neck and left shoulder pain and was given 5 days mc'.  'Subsequent visit for complaint of low back pain after the accident.  X-rays done were normal and he was discharged with 2 days mc'.

According to Mr Amirul, he has gathered more than sufficient evidence that the exhorbitant claims is not justifiable and he has also engaged a private investigator showing the other party going through his normal daily movements which does not correspond to his claimed medical injuries.  Mr Amirul had approached NTUC Income several times with these evidence, but NTUC remains unconvinced that the evidence is sufficient.

A few doubtful points were raised:

- Why is it that the insurance agent did not make a police report within 24 hours of the accident if he suffered a genuine injury? And only to come back with lawyer letters claiming exhorbitant injury claims 3 months later?

- The insurance agent's medical report stated that his car was hit on the front of the door, but the original pictures show that the dent was at the front right side fender just behind the right headlamp.

- How fast can a car travel in a tight carpark area like the one shown above such that a 29 year old man can suffer injuries that can demand injury claims of $13070 while a 77 year old lady is not the slight bit injured?

- Why is it that the insurance agent who had a clear view of Amirul's car in front and thus, can anticipate the impending accident, suffer a whiplash injury to back and neck while Mr Amirul's 77 year old mother-in-law, who had no idea nor no any view of any impending accident did NOT suffer any slight injury at all?

Bear in mind the driver of the Nissan Sunny who made the exhorbitant claim is an insurance agent who has been in the insurance line for 7 years, while Mr Amirul has no inkling of the intricacies of insurance. Being in the insurance line for so long, it is obvious that one party knows the industry very well, and its very loopholes and thus more likely to be able to capitalise on the system.

Mr Amirul has been kind enough to share their experience to benefit the man on the street so that they will not fall into the same predicament. Remember, the above could happen to YOU! Do share with your friends this website and bookmark this website (Ctrl D) so that everyone can benefit from it. So, what should you do in an accident?

- NEVER sign any written acknowledgement which has any words that suggest you are at fault, as it could be cleverly phrased and used against you in Court.

- Always take pictures (closed up and with vehicle number visible together with damage).

- Exchange particulars of all parties.

- Obtain witness contacts and if possible, written account of their testimonials, as cases can drag for months and witnesses will forget the details

- Confirm that no party is injured (Record conversation or have it stated in writing to declare that everyone is not injured, or get witness to verify) This is to ensure that neither party will malinger and slap you with ridiculous medical injury claims later on. Everyone knows how easy to fake injury or illness or attribute old injuries to this accident in order to unethically claim insurance monies at another party's expense.
We are a non partisan blog and we welcome the other party to post his comment and let the public decide.

If you suffer from similar insurance grievances, I implore all readers to place a comment, email us & bookmark us, and ask your friends to visit www.baokong.wordpress.com to place their comments. All constructive comments are welcome. If you suffer from similar grievances, do place your comments, and we will endeavour to highlight your predicament so that other people can benefit. We strive to reach out to as many people as possible and through collective strength, we can create change for the better. We welcome anyone to link articles to our articles for the benefit of all.

Your humble servant

She’s driven to nest, nurture, and nestle with loved ones, and he’s the primary target in the early years.

But further, she expects him to produce, provide, protect, and problem-solve to assist with whatever she needs.

His naturally independent nature responds: He simply does the best he can. His best fades, however, if she fails to fully respect his primary self-interest, next.

He’s driven to make himself significant, to overcome Nature and other barriers, compete with men, succeed in the workplace, and shape human events. It’s his role in life, and progress and accomplishment are their own rewards.

Her naturally grateful heart responds: If he’ll do those things on my behalf, I’ll reward him for husbanding and fathering. 

Merging these natural differences compatibly leads to cooperation—good! Failure to recognize and respect these differences leads to competition—ungood!

Fortunately, I had convinced him sometime before this that all important data on the family computer needed to be backed up regularly. Not all of my friends have paid attention to this advice, but this one had.

While he was still disturbed that the photo files had been erased, this incident wasn’t the disaster it could have been.

So what about you? Do you have a disaster recovery plan in effect should this type of event, where you lose irreplaceable data, occurs with your computer? Or, have you considered locking specific files on your computer to prevent accidental deletion?

Backup:

It’s now easier than ever to backup giving the large choice of relatively inexpensive media, including CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, external Hard Drives, and increasingly gaining popularity, Online Backup Services. Some estimates indicate that up to 75% of all computers will connect to online backup services within 10 years.

Mozy, which requires a broadband connection, is a free and easy to use online backup service that gives you 2GB of space allowing you to backup your data over the Internet. When needed, the backed up files can be restored over the Internet. You can read a review of this program and other online backup services on this Blog, or download the application at Mozy.

MyBloop, which was recommended to me by one of my online friends, is another free and easy to use online backup service. This free service offers unlimited file storage, allows you to share your files, and gives you the option of creating play lists of your uploaded music files.

Alternatively, you can back up to your media using a freeware program such as DriveImage XML which runs under Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista. This program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS. You can read a review of this program on this Blog, or download the application at Runtime.org.

Another Freeware Solution:

Nothing of course, beats a regularly scheduled incremental back up plan, but there is another solution to prevent the accidental deletion of data from your computer.

System Protect is a free, easy-to-use application from Crawler (the people who gave us Spyware Terminator), that helps keep your operating system stable, and protects important programs, documents and files from deletion caused by viruses, other users on your computer, or even your own mistakes.

Quick Facts:

Files & Folders Protection - prevents deletion of important files, programs and documents

Protection of Selected Files - lets you choose files and folders to be protected. This ensures that a virus, other people working with your computer or even you won’t delete an important document, your favorite photos, music, movies or other files

Increased Operating System Stability - protects essential system files to keep your operating system stable

Deletion Attempt Notification - notifies you of any attempt to delete any of the protected files

Protection for All Users - ensures protection for all computer users; administrator or restricted user

Works without Distracting You - silently protects your computer without interrupting your work

Deny Mode - automatically block deletion of any protected file

Since mistakes are inevitable on a computer, this neat little program could be just the thing you need to reduce the chances of having to deal with that unrecoverable error.

Download at: Download.com

At first blush, it's middle class "Annie" with her subprime mortgage, too ignorant or materialistic to admit that she can't afford the McMansion she lives in.

At second glance, it is the greedy, not-my-problem mortgage broker who knows banks routinely sell off homeowners' loans to Wall Street investors who will be left holding the bag when homeowners default.

Looking at it from another perspective, deregulation of the telecommunications, energy and financial markets — under the premise that free markets are self-policing and never irrational —  has been blamed for everything from the collapse of WorldCom and Enron, to the subprime mortgage crisis that has spiraled into the credit crunch we see today. And the chief instigator, critics point out, is none other than Sen. Phil Gramm, Sen. John McCain's economic adviser. Is it possible that an adviser who perceives no harm in unchecked deregulation may be at a loss for words, leaving McCain's presidential campaign with little choice but to run distraction — personal attacks — at a time when the rest of the nation is galvanized around the economic harm striking ever closer to home?

Flashing back to September 11, 2001, a few may trace the problem to President Bush's not so subtle suggestion to grow the economy in support of the War on Terror. The President admonished consumers to go on spending, and thanks to what amounted to an eight-year Wall Street "stimulus" consisting of interest rate cuts and easy credit presided over by presidential appointee and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Wall Street enjoyed what some economists have described as a once-in-a-generation bull market. The bear had to make his appearance eventually.

Tracing the issue back a step further, another camp of blame-gamers pinpoints the Clinton Administration, which in 1999 "openly urged the Federal National Mortgage Association (aka "Fannie Mae") to reduce down payment and credit requirements for subprime or 'at risk' borrowers in an attempt to increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers," the Visalia-Times Delta reports.

To watch "IOUSA", a recent documentary film following former Comptroller General David Walker, who in 2005 launched a "Fiscal Wake-Up Tour", our present problems are tied not so much to who occupies office — for both parties suffer from what Walker calls a "leadership deficit" — but to a financial system that is leveraged as much as 30 to 1. Simply put, that means that for every dollar a bank has in reserve, it can borrow 30 more. Artificial money props up an artificial bubble. And to these Perfect Economic Storm clouds, we add Walker's dire warning that the U.S. is headed toward bankruptcy. Unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security, not to mention a deficit approaching $11 trillion, threaten to sink our Ship of State as it is.

Will the recently passed $700 billion bailout help?

The Dow average was already on its way to an 80-year low on September 29, when the original bailout package failed. All the while, the media elite insisted that without a bailout the hurt would hit Main Street. Yet when Friday, October 3rd's second bailout passed the House, NASDAQ and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell even as bank-to-bank lending rates hit new highs. Why would Wall Street react as if the bail out were bad news when virtually everything we've heard in the mainstream media holds otherwise?

For one, $700+ billion — which if dollar bills were laid end-to-end would reach the moon and back 138 times over — simply isn't enough. Speculative figures run as a high as $1 trillion. For another, it came too late. The subprime crisis started over a year ago, yet only in recent weeks has President Bush acknowledged that Wall Street is grappling with a "house of cards". Unemployment rates, meanwhile, have surged to 6.1 percent nationally. Make no mistake, however: The hurt at home doesn't mean taxpayers won't be called upon to write Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson yet another blank check. Worse, the bailout plan might just make the problem worse, critics allege, by heaping inflation on an already shaky financial services sector.

In the midst of all the madness, perhaps there is a greater lesson here that we risk missing. That picture begins to emerge when we contemplate the notion "too big to fail".

What does that have to do with the human body, you ask?

Everything.

Call it nature or God, but every living creature is a multiple-cell organism. In fact, we have billions of tiny cells, each working in tandem to make our bodies function.

In bygone days, economies were less like machines and more akin to living organisms. Geographically rooted, they grew their own food, lent money to their own community members, put out their own fires and built their own homes with supplies they sourced within the region.

Planes, trains and automobiles have changed all that.

Today we have multinational corporations, increasingly, whose failures threaten to resonate throughout the global economy not like a handful of harmless 3.0 earthquakes on the Richter scale, but more akin to a life-altering 10.0 "Big One".

When globetrotting Gulliver begins to teeter as the ground beneath him sways, the little people won't pillage him, they'll be called upon to prop him up.

That's the New World Economy for you. This bailout isn't the first and it will hardly be the last.

What's wrong with this picture?

Globalism produces unprecedented potential for gain, but it also puts us at proportional risk. Socialist or Capitalist, the role governments undeniably play is this: underwriters of corporate risk. We need to stop right there and think long and hard about whether this is the road we want to go down.

One of the core problems, which is so taken for granted that it hasn't even received a second look in the mainstream media, is that an efficient market rests upon a surprisingly delicate underpinning. Sure there are trillions of dollars trading hands, and when all goes well it is a sight to behold. But what happens when the economic body gets sick? Can 10,000 or so massive cells do the work of millions that preceded them?

Probably not.

If our bodies were designed or evolved in the manner modern economies are structured, a simple cold, let alone heart disease or cancer, could take us out. A couple of sick cells would be sufficient to bring the entire body to its knees, a far cry from a massive, systemic infection attacking billions of cellular citizens.

Precisely the problem with conventional thinking is that it operates on the assumption that the Titanic is impossible to sink. But what if we spin the question around and ask ourselves what we can do to protect ourselves should the unthinkable take place?

What we need, the so-called tree huggers have, without realizing it, been calling for for years: Sustainability. Only this time, we're not just talking ecosystems. We're talking financial systems.

There's a lot of buzz about "going Green". But greening our economy isn't just about clean energy. It's about local control. Self sufficiency. The type of accountability no regulatory system can substitute for: neighbors, coworkers, bankers and business owners who know each other by name, who rely on each other. When you see the consequences of your actions played out not on some abstract global financial stage but in your own backyard, that's what economists call an incentive: an incentive not to play poker with your neighbor's money.

You might call this concept a CELL-BASED ECONOMY. It's modeled after the only sustainable concept evolution has taught us: A cosmos filled not with a few thousand Jupiter-sized bodies with a disproportionate gravitational pull, but blanketed as far into the depths of space as an astrophysicist can see. The human and animal organism, likewise, populated not by the few and irreplaceable but the many and regenerative, whose power lies in numbers, not size. Until economies restore a sense of "place" within the larger economic body, markets will again and again prove in need of oversight (regulation) to reign in the faceless masterminds of greed taking advantage of nameless victims, which the current globalized modus operandi all but encourages.

We'll know we've become active stake holders in this Cell-Based Economy the day we refer to economic participants as people, not too-big-to-fail multinational "entities" that can make or break economies in a few short months or years. Under this scenario, loan originators would not abdicate responsibility. For only when risk is no longer another investor's problem, will much of the temptation to approve hasty, house-of-cards loans fall by the wayside.

Going back to a Main Street economy might just save us from ourselves. Why? Because the more impenetrable the global economy grows, the more difficult it becomes for would-be entrepreneurs to elbow their way in to the feeding trough otherwise known as the American Dream. President Woodrow Wilson, as far back as 1913 in a book titled "The New Freedom", bemoaned the fact that we have a "system of credit" that all but precludes the little guy. We pay more taxes yet become, essentially, debtors, producing very little. Indeed, that is what the United States has become: Not the proud productivity-based economy of yesteryear, but a Middle Class-squeezing, downwardly mobile "consumer economy" whose very survival is dependent on the goodwill of global benefactors (investors). So when former Comptroller General David Walker talks about an $800 billion annual trade deficit with China in the chilling financial exposé "IOUSA", this is the kind of leverage we're giving away. Equally disturbing, it all but hog ties us where foreign policy is concerned. We can ill afford to anger nations who prop us up financially by opposing the actions of their Axis of Evil allies, be it saber-rattling nationalists in Iran or Russia.

The fact that so many Americans have poor credit, little or no rainy day fund to speak of, and are defaulting in such vast numbers paints an unsustainable economic picture. But it isn't just the little guy who is struggling. If nothing more, this debacle has proven that Big Business is more vulnerable than we thought. Looking back a year or so ago when the first rumblings on Wall Street were shaping up, sovereign Mid East wealth funds came to the rescue. Yet NASDAQ Chief Executive Bob Greifeld praised the 20 percent stake Arabs stood to gain in the exchange as "a good transaction for the U.S. capital markets system … it will make sure that NASDAQ is a key player in the global consolidation." If "global consolidation", arguably a euphemism for economic contraction, is what market bellwethers foresee, what does that say about the long-term solvency of the US economy?

"Last week, just by coincidence, our national debt exceeded the $10 trillion mark, and a lot of that money is owed to foreigners. The tide of money that washed away any sense of proportion or ethics on Wall Street also came in part from overseas. When critics of the $700 billion bailout complain that it was passed just to keep foreign banks happy, there’s some truth to that. It’s a chilling sign of just how much national sovereignty we’ve signed away in return for overseas capital," writes Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman.

From a foreign investment standpoint, American assets may resemble a smorgasbord — fodder for a fire sale in the event the meltdown continues despite the bailout. In one possible scenario, financial assets may go the way the U.S. steel and auto industries did in the 1980s and '90s — outsourcing investments the way steel and automobile companies outsourced production. Do those of us who call Main Street USA home wish to owe Asia and the Mid East our mortgages and 401Ks? When the dust settles, will the U.S. financial services sector have an American face?

If you bring the issue out of the abstract and closer to home, the global business model has brought us to a point where critical vaccines and medications may be manufactured by a single source. A pandemic, economic, political or natural disaster threaten to precipitate mass shortages or an over-reliance upon risky, untested foreign sources. One day, what if those shortages included food? What if a severe economic crisis combined with even higher fuel prices means that truckers are temporarily, even, unable to receive a paycheck? Will every grocery chain and retail store from one end of the country to the other face the prospect of bare shelves because the handful of transportation companies to survive globalization's push toward consolidation are idling down due to strike or disaster, manmade or otherwise?

In an efficient, mechanistic economic system there are fewer and fewer redundancies. This leaves fewer players in place to go on conducting "business as usual" in the event of a crisis. The result is that problems that formerly hit one community — not unlike the recent gasoline shortages in the Southeast following Hurricane Ike — may transform from regional problems, to national shortages, to global crisis.

There is something to be said for the idea that local communities should be self sustaining to whatever degree possible. This means that each region of the country should develop or retain capacity to produce food and energy using locally sourced suppliers, and to maintain manufacturing capacity. That community model may seem unrealistic for now, but it should be a long-term national security priority.

It was once believed with near religious devotion that the world was flat. And later, infamously, that the Titanic was too sophisticated to sink. If there's one thing this economic crisis has taught us, it's never say never.

It would be foolhardy to manufacture a rope with only one thread, for at best it could be described as a string. Yet with each multinational merger, each death of a competitor, each transformation of a local economy into a consumer economy, we're taking a rope of many threads and reducing it, cut by cut, to just one cord. That sort of efficiency may reduce waste and redundancy, but it's also the source of our global economy's potential unraveling.

Perhaps it's time to rethink basic assumptions.

The prospect of global recession is an inevitable byproduct of an economy that has become overly enmeshed. Like a pair of young lovers joined at the hip, this is a relationship that might look ideal at first glance, but is psychologically dysfunctional. None of this is to say that international business ought to become a thing of the past. National and international trade brings commodities that are overabundant in one region to areas of the world where they are in great demand. That form of commerce cannot and should not be stopped. Rather, it is a long-overdue reminder that global business should not come at the expense of local productiveness (sustainability).

Reviving an economic system that promotes multiple supply chains with emphasis on local distribution and long-term sustainability as a hedge against instability e