>Plenty of companies, indeed entire industries, base their business model on being evil. The insurance business, for instance, depends on the fact that insurers charge customers more than their insurance is worth; that’s fair enough, since if they didn’t do that they wouldn’t be viable as businesses. What isn’t fair is the panoply of cynical techniques that many insurers use to avoid, as far as possible, paying out when the insured-against event happens. Just ask anyone who has had a property suffer a major mishap.

The article isn't saying that insurance companies are 'evil' for making a profit but instead for doing everything they can to withhold payment, not every insurance company does this of course but many of them know that customers are more likely to accept 50% blame in a 0% blame car accident or accept a reduced payout over minor technicalities because the alternative is going months without a car and spending a significant amount of time and money in court.

This analogy is entirely applicable to governments too where an 'evil' government might, at great cost, make benefit programs difficult or humiliating to obtain to discourage legitimate claimants from doing so, never mind straight up corruption or cronyism when it comes to allocating public funds.