Insurance is a scam, and it pisses me off that we’re still tolerating their bullshit.
The concept is good. But the way it is run right now is just taking money and fight tooth and nail to pay as less as they can gey away with it.
I would argue that the concept is flawed. The base idea is that you calculate statistics on how much you would be likely to have to pay out, then set premiums such that you’ll always be ahead of payouts. Essentially, everyone pays so that the unfortunate few who need help can get money out of the common pool to help.
This is just taxes, basically. We already do this with fire departments and such. However, insurance adds a profit motive on top because it’s a company, so the amount they take in must always be significantly higher than the amount they pay out. And if it’s a publicly traded company then the amount they make above and beyond the amount they pay out must always be higher every quarter.
Like at a certain point, why not just do taxes and better disaster relief? As an added bonus, the government would have an extra incentive to care about things that may make the payouts increase, like poor infrastructure or climate change.
Taxes and disaster relief is a form of insurance, I agree with you there. When I say the concept is good, I mean people pooling a little bit in a big fund and then if something happens, the money is taken from the fund.
Insurance companies in the current system will nickel and dime you and deny your claims.
We already do this to an extent. It’s called FEMA.
I am not against the government growing it’s role in this sector, I just would be concerned about the perverse incentives and subsidizing the very wealthy. Why should I have to pay for your nice house on the river that exceeds 8x or more my annual gross income? You couldn’t get private insurance because everyone knew this was a really bad place for a McMansion so you went to the government and got a free lunch. Also you are pretty much asking renters, who are usually poorer, to give money to homeowners who are usually richer.
Maybe if it was structured more like FDIC. The government provides insurance but there is a cap on how much. If you want more go to the free market.
If it weren’t a way to extract profit and the money stayed in a fund. It would secure society, Almost like social security. Just stop building in flood zones ffs.
