Yeah, it's kind of weird. My company just started offering something like that this year, but it's cancer insurance, heart attack insurance, stroke insurance, and it's got three or four different diseases. You are allowed to pick one or multiple diseases that you think you're likely to get, and you pay them a certain sum of money every year. After three or something months of not having said disease, you are fully invested for a certain amount of money. If you're diagnosed with whichever disease you picked, you get the full amount of money in the pot.
It's probably a great comfort for people with a strong family history of heart disease or cancer or whatever, but it's a little too much like playing a gruesome sort of lotto for my tastes...
My old company offered it, my new company doesn't. It surprises me, too.
Not sure about DC, Louisiana, or Arizona. All I know about DC is that the cost of living there is increasing, that my company's about to open an office there (so the market there must be pretty saturated), and that there's a lot of government renovation going on. With Louisiana, it *might* be Katrina... They don't do a lot of new construction in general, so they probably have a fewer number of engineers, but a higher number of bigwigs in for the reconstruction efforts. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that it's artificially inflated because of that.
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