Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 1001 posts

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#111

Post by jfengel »

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

Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries, their executives, doctor's office billing coding, advertising, etc.

The shareholders take home only a fraction. But a lot of money gets spent that simply doesn't need to be. Other countries avoid the deadweight loss of the middle man.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#112

Post by Sabinus »

Animats wrote: post #107

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…

If the market is allowed to price insurance correctly then we can motivate building designs to be more disaster resist. If the McMansion can't get insurance but disaster resistant, modest homes do, then people will adapt.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#113

Post by urhmbutwait »

orange_joe wrote: post #94
JKCalhoun wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave… > the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there… Seems like the result is the same — people will live there but without insurance.

worse, you’ll be paying to bail them out in the name of solidarity.

That’s insurance?

Change the euphemism from government to private insurance to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from squishing us… still “on the books” as a co-mingled pool of funds to shift around to solve problems.

Aw …sad… other people exist and need resources too. Not just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#114

Post by forgotoldacc »

Daz1 wrote: post #104
forgotoldacc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curio…

???

Technology has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. What are you defining as "technology"? Software as a service chatbots? Because those aren't saving anyone.

And 227000 people died 20 years ago in a tsunami in Indonesia. They had cell phones and the internet. Is that pre-technology? 50 million died in famines in China in the 1950s. They had TV, radio, and computers. Is that pre-technology?

Technology is just tools that humans make to solve a problem.[1] It's not magic. And in the case of the Japanese tsunami, the most basic technology that humans have had for tens of thousands of years saved countless lives: just building a wall, and making it tall enough to block rising water. [2] But wrapping an entire country in walls is kind of unfeasible. And you can't protect the entire world. We never know what kind of disaster will strike next, and technology to protect us only develops after we suffer the consequences at least once.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology#Prehistoric

[2] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/photo-essay-the-seawalls-of-toh...

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#115

Post by owlbite »

lmm wrote: post #99
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…

Don't worry, the California government is responding to that by making it illegal to stop offering insurance in the state. That will definitely fix the problem.

Source? Many companies seem to be stopping offering insurance in the state just fine!

The most recent moves seem to be relaxing the pricing rules to allow major disaster pricing and recharging reinsurance rates in exchange for insurers offering more policies in high risk areas.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#116

Post by scoofy »

When nerds like me were freaking out about climate change in 2003, what did people think we we’re talking about?!?

This is the exact scenario every single scientist I studied under openly discussed: probably not an extinction level event, but very, very expensive… Expensive to the point of it being cheaper in the long run to switch to renewables asap and hope for the best.

It’s like a 150M conservatives are all at once are saying “Wait a minute! We should do something about this!”

Uh… yea, no shit.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#118

Post by oefrha »

sadeshmukh wrote: post #55
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No one can truly afford to live there, if you price in the cost of insurance. The only reason people live there is because they haven't hit the 1/100 chance yet.

There are plenty of very rich people living there who can afford the house burning down every single year. So false.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#119

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Spivak wrote: post #101
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct. Caps are fine as a short-term measure.

In the long term, they’re putting a patient running a fever on immunosuppressants. The fever will go. But the patient will die.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#120

Post by Arainach »

AlexandrB wrote: post #106
Arainach wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>I don't blame some people

You should. Just because something is imperfect doesn't make it bad. Should the truck loophole be closed? Yes. Has CAFE improved every other class of vehicle? Yes.

Post reply on HN