Suggesting to US patients that they should not be availed of the latest treatment because it is too expensive guarantees an ugly confrontation with overtones of discrimination.
When COBRA ran out a little more than a year ago, they signed up for the expensive "guaranteed issue" plan.
Equitable Life closed to new business 12 years ago after being forced to honour expensive guarantees that stretched back three decades.
And Kevin Arnott, director of with-profit management at Phoenix, points out that many funds were closed because they got into financial difficulties, so are forced to invest in safer – and therefore usually worse-performing – assets, or have expensive guarantees which eat into capital – so the scope for improving performance is limited.
Also, buying from an expensive brand doesn't necessarily guarantee quality.
"Rather than simply ending the widely discredited direct payment program, the Senate Agriculture Committee has created an expensive new entitlement program that guarantees most of the income of farm businesses already enjoying record profits," said Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the environmental working group.
The next summer, which the writer sadly feels will be the last that he goes home for haying, he gives his father an expensive new watch dustproof, shockproof, waterproof, guaranteed for 5 years.
By signing up for an expensive cruise, he explains, you're guaranteed "a level of clientèle that's just like you.
However, I feel it is an expensive way to do things with no guarantees".
It was an expensive round for Sotheby's, which acknowledged that it had lost $14.6 million in guarantees.
