Hans Dieter Meyer

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Hans Dieter Meyer (born October 31, 1936 in Lüneburg ; † December 3, 2015 in Kaltenkirchen ) was a German lawyer and insurance specialist .

Life

In his hometown Meyer was the owner of a general agency for a large German insurer for several years, which he inherited from his father. He was a member of several commissions and held various functions in representative associations. At the same time he studied law and passed the first state examination.

In the mid-1970s he sold the general agency and broke with the German insurance industry because he felt that he could no longer identify with its structures. He lived in the United States for several years, where he published the booklet Insurance and Regulation - Services an Competition . This gave him some popularity, after which he worked for a long time as Director of International Research for the National Insurance Consumer Organization, a consumer protection agency founded by consumer lawyer Ralph Nader . In 1980 he returned to Hamburg and was licensed as an insurance advisor. In 1982 he self-published Ratgeber Versicherung , a work that for the first time dealt with the problems of insurance from the perspective of the policyholder and gave readers recommendations for action. Because of the great success of Ratgeber Versicherung , the works Ratgeber Lebensversicherung , Ratgeber Krankenversicherung and insurance advisor for business and occupation, which were then published by Heyne-Verlag, soon followed . With the proceeds from these activities, he founded the Association of Insureds in 1982 , which was to act on the one hand as an advisory organization for consumers on insurance issues and on the other hand as a counterweight to the lobbying organizations of the insurance industry. Because of this unusually courageous undertaking at the time, a jury consisting of seven journalists awarded the 1982 BdV the 1982 consumer prize . Shortly thereafter, the BdV made headlines because it described the capital-forming insurance as "legal fraud". An attempt by the insurance industry to prevent this failed: The Hamburg district court allowed the named designation as an expression of freedom of expression.

Hans Dieter Meyer was often criticized by the insurance industry. Although he has initiated a number of legislative initiatives and fundamental judgments with his activities , his positions have not been fully adopted by the legislature or the courts, but compromises that have often been rejected by him have been found.

Nevertheless, Meyer and the BdV succeeded in gaining popularity through numerous and increasingly successful model trials and class actions. The association founded a scientific advisory board that organized annual science conferences. He concluded group and framework insurance contracts with a few selected insurance companies, at unusually good conditions at the time. This was intended on the one hand to help the now approximately 25,000 members of the BdV to better insurance protection and on the other hand to demonstrate that better insurance conditions and lower premiums are quite feasible. These group and framework insurance contracts competed in that the BdV members were able to leave them twice a year (in the middle and at the end of the year) in order to end the insurance cover or to obtain the desired insurance cover elsewhere. At the time, the insurance industry considered such short commitment periods to be impossible and the policyholders who had been recruited regularly kept their contracts for at least 10 years. The proof of feasibility carried out with the group and framework insurances of the BdV and accompanying political activities soon ensured that the "10-year contracts" were abolished and thus a minimum of competition also entered the insurance business.

In September 2002 Hans Dieter Meyer was sentenced to five years in prison for years of sexual abuse of the underage daughter of a partner. After three and a half years he was released from prison.

After his release from prison, Meyer was no longer able to gain a foothold professionally.

Hans Dieter Meyer died in Kaltenkirchen in December 2015 at the age of 79.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Who is behind ... the Federation of Insured?" In: stern.de, May 31, 2007, paragraph 4.
  2. ^ Edda Castelló: Hans-Dieter Meyer †. Association of Insured Persons, December 21, 2015, accessed on December 22, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Hans Dieter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meyer, Hans-Dieter; Meyer Hans D. (authors' names)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, insurance specialist and author
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Luneburg
DATE OF DEATH 3rd December 2015
Place of death Kaltenkirchen , Germany