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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

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Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#101

Post by Spivak »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95
mgiampapa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Transfers wealth from shareholders, patients and taxpayers to management, bankers and intermediaries. Broadly speaking, caps are stupid—akin to treating liver enzymes directly when they spike versus seeing them as the sign of deeper problems.

I think that's a great metaphor for the situation, when you get a patient running a 105 fever you put them in an ice bath and then consider what underlying problem is ailing them.

You do the first part so they don't die before the long-term treatment kicks in.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#102

Post by EGreg »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

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…

Can’t you say that about any part of LA? Once a fire gets going, it grows and can destroy any neighborhood.

Call me crazy but if I was the mayor of LA I’d make them invest heavily in PREVENTION. Cameras and drones all over the place in the forests, to nip fires in the bud (and carch arsonists). I would also make sure that the live video footage would be used only for that purpose. It would use AI at the edge to flag every fire immediately and alert nearest authorities, and otherwise delete footage. There may be other AI at the edge uses added later by the regulators but I’d work to put in place heavy bars to overcome (eg 70% in a public referendum) before they are added.

I would also invest heavily in mobile firefighting tools and materials. The firefighters using buckets is pitiful.

But then again, LA hasn’t invested in itself for decades. It’s like the opposite of NYC: rich people don’t want to live in Downtown LA, they live in the equivalent of our Brooklyn, say Manhattan Beach and Sheepshead Bay by the beach.

Because half of downtown looks increasingly more like skid row. Signage and streets are something out of the 70s literally. And there pretty much hasn’t been any new skyscrapers built since the 80s. The skyline is stuck in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie era.

I stayed in Freehand hostel which is actually pretty nice, even though there’s abandoned buildings and homeless all around. I met a drunk Andy Dick there by the pool one evening LOL.

And you people from San Francisco — it ain’t much better over where you are. I visited Twitter HQ right when Elon took over. And let me tell you — there is a curious juxtaposition of City Hall, City Opera, The SF Philharmonic, and the fourth corner of that illustrious intersection is… a large abandoned alleyway with dumpsters. What? Imagine Lincoln Center in NYC having that.

On my show I did a lot of interviews — with regulators, technologists, sociopolitical commentators like Noam Chomsky. But one of my most down-to earth interviews was in SF of a homeless guy w his dog. See it for yourself what I’m talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqjFeaDLuYQ

PS: to the silent downvoters… normally I don’t mind but this time you’re just doing it out of spite. Watch the video or say something. I bet you live there and don’t want to have these things pointed out. SF and LA were so great… so many movements started there. Lately people are fleeing and the homelessness is out of control.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#103

Post by JKCalhoun »

datavirtue wrote: post #7

Part of this is that homes are too fancy and large. All of that translates into elevated costs and risks.

Also, they are not building small homes anyway.

Developers here in the Midwaste aren't going to put a cheap house on a lot if they can instead put a 3500 sq. ft. home and get triple the profit.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#104

Post by Daz1 »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #40
api_or_ipa wrote: post #11

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 drough…

>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.

Conveniently you selected pre-technology examples. How curious.

Meanwhile the impending global famine(s) - (plural) of the 20th century never came to be because captitalism kept pumping out agriscience improvements to improve crop yields to 10 times what they were in 1900.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#105

Post by [deleted] »

hnburnsy wrote: post #97
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

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…

Not just the rates are managed, but also deductibles. I'd gladly have a 5 figure deductble to keep my or miums lower, but regulators think this is unfair to some.

[deleted]

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#106

Post by AlexandrB »

Arainach wrote: post #52
atleastoptimal wrote: post #29

Every year, humanity grows richer, more resilient to natural disasters, and more capable of predicting natural disasters and their negative outcomes. The point of insurance is to spread the expected burden of calamities that will affect a minority of a population to the entire population, so that those affected will have a financial safety net. This principle works regardless of how disastrous or prone to calamity a…

>We don't live in a world like in 1905 where an earthquake would lead to a fire that burns down an entire city I'm not convinced that that's true, and even if it is a huge chunk of population (world, US, pick your area, it applies broadly) keep fighting to regress us to these periods. People complaining about rules they don't understand is in some sense as old as the existence of rules, but the internet has dramatica…

> At the same time a significant chunk of the population works to defund and defang all government, preventing the existing rules and codes - labor protections, fire protections, food safety protections, etc. - from being adequately monitored and enforced.

This isn't helped by actual bad rules and regulations on the books. Some minor examples are the prop 95 warnings on every damn thing or the way CAFE standards work to encourage the sale of more pickup trucks. I don't blame some people for wanting to scrap the whole regulatory system after encountering enough of these.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#107

Post by Animats »

Not uninsurable, but buildings are going to have to become tougher.

It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.

The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#108

Post by noirbot »

amazingamazing wrote: post #53
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an insurance problem, or a market problem, or an MBA econ problem. It's a "Do we want cultural extinction or a relatively comfortable and habitable planet?" problem, which is not quite the same thing. No amount of faith-based "We will adapt!" is going to make an impression until evidence appears that we are actually adapting in real, tangible ways. Clearly, objectively, and empirically we are not. We are…

i unironically believe the insurance is a great signal for pricing externalities. if you want, imo, a comfortable planet, you should want everyone to have to pay, out of pocket, for the risk they’re taking. the result would be people not living in areas that a risky, engaging in behaviors or risking, or partaking in things the contribute to the world becoming more volatile.

But isn't the issue that I may have been living in an area for decades and because the government didn't correctly price/deter externalities, now I can't afford to live somewhere? The companies lobbying for the abilities to pollute and otherwise add risk to the world can afford to pay the higher insurance rates. The folks who live in the areas they put at risk often can't.

Insurance costs rising are a good signal, but they're essentially a way to tax normal people for the faults of governments and major companies. It does reflect the real risk, but it's not like the fact of people living in most of these areas is the reason the area is risky.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#109

Post by lotsofpulp »

wuiheerfoj wrote: post #80
Aurornis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything I have the exact same experience when discussing anything insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how much profit insurance companies a…

>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs Do you have any source for this? I’m assuming (because HN) that you had the USA in mind, and it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me given that US insurance fees are more than single digit percentages higher than other high quality care countries with privatised healthcare systems

These are all the publicly listed health insurers in the US, with public financials, so the numbers come from the 10-Q and 10-K reports filed with the SEC.

Note that the first one, United Health, has slightly higher profit margins than the rest because UNH has an enormous business selling healthcare itself, not just insurance (they own a lot of doctor groups and outpatient clinics and employ a lot of doctors and nurses).

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ELV/elevance-healt...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CI/cigna-group/pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HUM/humana/profit-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CNC/centene/profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MOH/molina-healthc...

The other big insurers will be Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and various plans franchised with Blue Cross Blue Shield, but they are all non profit.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/941...

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#110

Post by forgetfreeman »

hnburnsy wrote: post #97
bluedevil2k wrote: post #8

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…

Not just the rates are managed, but also deductibles. I'd gladly have a 5 figure deductble to keep my or miums lower, but regulators think this is unfair to some.

Given over half of all households in the country have less than $20k in savings I'd say concerns over equality of access may be well founded. Edit: No? The poors can go fuck themselves? Alright then I guess.
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