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Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

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Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.

Wouldn't the insurance company's incentive be to sell you the most coverage they can?

Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#72
post #47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having t…

Did you know that you could charge people different rates for insurance based on risk profiles or deny them outright? You used to be able to anyway. I’m fine subsidizing people of a similar risk profile that have a hit by a bus moment. I’m not fine subsidizing the obese and chronically ill.

That makes you very out of step with most Americans. You choose to pick on the obese because it’s more socially acceptable, but also people with cancer, kidney disease, etc.

Your position would be considered deeply immoral by most people (rightly). Maybe spend less time on-line and interact with regular people.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#74
post #31
post #23

> In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it. Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.

Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.

Isn’t that exactly the problem pointed out on the article? In an attempt to make driving more affordable, the state causes the victims of drivers to pay for their own victimization. Par the course for a CA law but still.

As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#75
As a German living in the US, it's also interesting to me how dramatically more expensive insurance in the US is compared to Europe. The best explanation I could come up with is that 1) traffic laws are barely enforced, at least in Los Angeles you see most people driving with phone in hand and we have virtually no speed cameras or speeding enforcement, whereas in Germany, even tiny villages may have two speed cameras, one at each side of town 2) there seem to be no enforced maintenance requirements for cars in the US, whereas in Germany there's a mandatory check of the car's proper functioning every 2 years 3) insurance in the US is probably is cross-subsidizing lawyers as signified through the ubiquitous accident lawyer ads on billboards, radio etc.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered. I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mai…

This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.

You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#77
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that even mean? The insurance is for the person who gets a hand cut off in an industrial accident. It's not for the employer.

So it is the employer who has to pay for it, not other citizens.

Who pays is not that simple.

The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.

So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.

So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.

But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.

So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.

So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#78

Making cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis. We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.

Its not juat investment, *ts rules overhaul to make the regulatory burden of development of public transit as small as possible because that is mostly what is screwing up inv#sting in public transport

Re: Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

#79
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.

Isn’t that exactly the problem pointed out on the article? In an attempt to make driving more affordable, the state causes the victims of drivers to pay for their own victimization. Par the course for a CA law but still. As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.

Worth pointing out that uninsured motorists coverage in California is quite inexpensive. And that is NOT true of Florida.

Where I disagree with the point of the article is insurance is a last resort thing. If you want to reduce traffic deaths that's not where to focus your attention. Reading the article it smells of neoliberal thinking.

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