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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#31

Like we see in California, when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave. Same in Florida. If the free market truly was allowed run normally, the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there. Is that a bad thing? If someone was living in a house near where they tested missiles, we'd call them crazy. At what point can we…

Clearly it’s not true that “no one” could afford to live there. And if demand was low then the housing would become more affordable

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#32
post #23

Like we see in California, when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave. Same in Florida. If the free market truly was allowed run normally, the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there. Is that a bad thing? If someone was living in a house near where they tested missiles, we'd call them crazy. At what point can we…

There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them, likely this would be the solution in California without price caps. You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof. These buildings would be realistically insurable in both California or Florida. They would cost more to build, not THAT much mor…

Steel frame, flame retardant insulation and cladding, rammed earth, .. these are all options.

Flammable trees well away from a leaf free clean guttered (or no gutter) house are also no compromise requirements.

See: https://research.csiro.au/bushfire/ and https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/services/testing-and-ce...

for the rabbit hole of Australian Bushfire housing certification and testing.

Burning Down the House: Trial by Fire CSIRO- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBtawn7IAnI

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't live in places where your home is going to get destroyed every couple of decades by wildfires, floods, or hurricanes. There are more of these places now because of climate change and a lot of people are going to have to migrate over the next century, like huge global migrations. Insurance can't/won't allow a bunch of people to deny this reality any more (or at least much longer). LA is going to be pretty un…

You can; it's just expensive.

So is living on the sea bed. It's irrationally expensive and inconvenient, which is why we don't do it.

Living in areas in constant danger of flooding and/or burning and/or storm wind damage and/or drought seems like quite an eccentrically inconvenient lifestyle flex.

Unless you like disaster movies.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price caps always seem like such a transparent political move.

How about profit caps? I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders. To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.

> To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.

This has baffled me ever since Obamacare was first passed - it seems that each year the insurance companies have an incentive to drive up the cost of healthcare, since that’s how they earn more money in absolute terms. Is it not so?

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#35
post #17

Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author decries and says won't work this time: technological change and adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we a…

It's always amazing and disappointing to see how many people actually believe that prices can be lowered by legislative fiat, or that "price gouging" is an actual thing that happens. I guess they would prefer to have shortages instead of paying market rates, and then complain about "greedy big business" or (my favorite) "late stage capitalism".

People who buy health care in the US already get de facto shortages (from denied coverage) and inflated market rates.

Other kinds of insurance are no different.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#36
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insurance companies have pretty thing profit margins regardless, even in areas where profits are not capped. It's a competitive marketplace!

I'm not sure I believe your factoid. Can you cite? UHC is one of the wealthiest companies in the world.

their september 2024 earnings put them at 6% margin. that’s not very good. for reference apple is 15%, mcdonalds is 32% and costco is about 3%. that being said compared to a competitor, elevance at 2.5%, they’re doing well. a little worse than allstate (car and home insurance), which is about 7%.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#37
The California (and Florida) situation is easily explainable [1]. As this video points out you have these forces in play:

1. The state who sets insurance price caps for political expediency, basically to increase house prices (because they'd go down if insurance prices could float freely). BTW we have examples of areas that are uninsurable like the Florida Keys;

2. The homeowners who want their house prices to go up and want to pay as little as possible for home insurance; and

3. Insurance companies who can't write too many policies so they remain solvent. Price caps ultimately lead to insurers leaving the market.

LA in particular has competing problems: wildfires and earthquakes. If you want to avoid total loss due to wildfires, first you wouldn't build in Pacific Palisades at all. It's a vegetation rich area between hills with potentially high winds. If you want to avoid fire loss, you would build out of concrete not timber-framed buildings.

But the problem is that earthquakes have the opposite building priorities. Lumber is actually quite good in earthquake zones because you tend to get less loss of life from the collapse of timber houses.

Now you can build concrete houses that are earthquake-resistant (eg in Japan) but it's expensive.

Ultimately all of this comes down to a malaise brought on by high house prices. Voters consistently vote for policies that increase their house prices with absolutely no concern for the externalities.

If it now costs $1 million to build an "average" house, then you're going to be spending $20,000+ a year on insurance. If your house only cost $100,000, you wouldn't have that problem.

It's even worse in California because a lot of property taxes are capped so the state government can't even recoupe taxes from a lot of high-priced property but they suffer the costs of it (eg by being the insurer of last resort).

[1]: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT2Jek6a6/

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price caps always seem like such a transparent political move.

How about profit caps? I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders. To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.

> How about profit caps?

What period do you put it over for property insurance? Profit caps work for health insurance because claims are typically not correlated. The percentage of your customers with cancer won’t 5x one year and go back to baseline the next. New drugs or treatments (or a drug going off patent) can cause correlated swings, but generally costs to health insurers don’t change a lot year to year.

For property insurance, you need to bring in profits most years to fund the year when there are multiple category V hurricanes or large fires.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#40

Every era has it's Malthusian alarmists and without fail, each has been proven wrong by exactly the same thing the author decries and says won't work this time: technological change and adaption. There's no reason to think this time will be any different. Will some places become uninsurable? Sure, plenty of places over time have become uninsurable. Will the whole world became uninsurable? Absolutely not, because we a…

Thinking technology will always save us is no different from divine or magical thinking.

Lots of societies and civilizations have collapsed. Some were straight up wiped off the earth and we don't even know what happened to them. Western civilization has had a good 500 years, and America has had a good 250 years, but that doesn't mean things can never go bad in the future.

Plenty of places have had catastrophic droughts, famines, and plagues. Nearly half of Europe died a few times from plagues. Most natives in America were absolutely wiped out from disease and other issues. Tens of millions died of famine in China last century. Tsunamis washed away and killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and Japan this current century.

In the past, the Krakatoa eruption messed with the climate around the world and made the sky dark. The Bronze Age Collapse is something we still don't understand but nearly wiped out everything in the western world. With population density higher than ever, disasters that match major historical ones would be far more destructive. It's really just been an unusually peaceful few decades in first world countries and people have gotten too comfortable.

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