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

Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 712 posts

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#191

Post by t0mas88 »

doubled112 wrote: post #44
devbent wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trampolines are obscenely high risk and injuries are very common. On top of that, if a neighborhood kid comes in to your yard and breaks their leg on your trampoline, your home owners insurance is going to be involved.

Is this something we just don't worry about in Canada? Because we only pay to park at the hospital?

Probably the liability is also different? You're much more likely to be liable for some things in the US compared to other places.

In my part of Europe, if someone breaks something while making normal use of your trampoline that would be considered an accident. You would only be liable if you had grossly neglected maintenance on the thing, knew that (or would reasonably be expected to know that), and they can prove that this has caused the injury.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#193

Post by jeffbee »

nneonneo wrote: post #178
jeffbee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you recently rob a bank or carjack an old lady? If not, I sincerely doubt that anyone would go to the trouble of following you around.

Yes, but clearly an insurance company will go to the trouble of flying a plane around my house. Whether it’s manned or unmanned is immaterial - I wouldn’t want them to do it.

You want to have insurance but you're not willing to let your insurer inspect the covered assets?

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#194

Post by username332211 »

neilv wrote: post #161
trogdor wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are insurance rates regulated by the government? I understand that the state has a strong interest in ensuring that insurance companies are adequately capitalized, but I don’t understand the state interest in directly regulating premium prices. (Or is that not what you are referring to?)

Why is basic insurance for ordinary people a for-profit business at all, rather than something the collective (administered by the state) does to soften any misfortune that hits any of its members?

If you do that, you must also regulate the sort of vehicles ordinary people can buy and the sort of homes they can own.

After all, we can't have the community suffer an unsustainable loss because some guy earned too much money and selfishly bought a Camaro.

So, obviously the collective should create a list of cheap and economical cars ordinary people are allowed to buy.

If that doesn't feel right to you, remember, the so called "freedom of choice" is a bourgeois value. Transcend it.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#196

Post by sdenton4 »

gizmo686 wrote: post #163
salawat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not wrong. Insurance with perfect info ceases to ne any form of a recognizable social good. In fact, it just becomes indistinguishable from a sanctioned form of populational segregation, instead of the pull-a-long stick-with-carrot through which risk is mitigated against long tail events through active propagation of best practices as a condition of coverage. Insurance companies should be exposed to the same…

Insurance with perfect info would be an amazing social good. If they could say "you can build a house there, but it will burn down in a forest fire 15 years from now", we could make an informed decision on if we want to build that house.

And yet, people build and rebuild in flood plains...

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#197

Post by ls612 »

ska wrote: post #129
myself248 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought risk pooling was the point?

Risk pooling is fundamental to insurance, but not all pools are the same. The observation is that if you aren't able to discriminate at all or subdivide the pools, the only response is to up the average rate to cover the aggregate risk as best you can estimate it. This gets tricky if your ability to change rates is constrained, also. These things are always in fundamental tension, and also in tension with privacy. It…

In extreme cases forcing too much pooling can cause market failure. The intuition is that the least risky customers decline to purchase (much) insurance, making the average risk higher, increasing prices, making more people decline insurance, in a vicious cycle. It’s fundamentally similar to Akerlof’s market for lemons.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#198

Post by t0mas88 »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #77
op00to wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Growing up I saw my friend’s foot pointed the wrong direction after a “double bounce” caught his foot in the gap between the trampoline surface and the supports. We were careful kids.

Idk how any of us survived the 90s with trampolines in constant use! We would jump off them into pools, jump onto them from the roof, double bounce each other half a dozen feet in the air. I even mastered the “art” of jumping off of it and landing on the ground (from 6 feet up), rolling and popping back up.

We also sat in the luggage area of a station wagon with 5 kids on the way to the swimming pool... That would probably get the driver arrested if you did it today.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#199

Post by djha-skin »

I used to work for Verisk, an insurance tech holding company, who owned a company that took pictures of people's roofs using airplanes and special cameras. They got sued over a patent violation with EagleView[1], who claimed the tech idea as their own, and settled.

> The strategic alliance allows customers seamless and integrated access to EagleView technology within Verisk’s Xactware platform

Xactware is a product that customers (read: insurance companies) use to figure out how much money to pay on a claim.

The whole idea is to speed up the claims process. Insurance agents don't need to go out to people's houses to examine roof damage. But we also had a department doing some pretty sophisticated stuff around preventing claims fraud, so I'm not surprised.

1: https://www.verisk.com/company/newsroom/verisk-and-eagleview...

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#200

Post by DSMan195276 »

trogdor wrote: post #138
brogrammernot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, I spent years working and building 0-1 insurance products. Let me peel back some stuff that’s been happening behind the scenes. Some officials are elected and some are appointed which all depends on the state. Appointed officials are usually more reasonable and elected are not because higher rates = mad voters = re-election chances lower. For a long time, insurers have struggled to get sufficient rate change…

Why are insurance rates regulated by the government? I understand that the state has a strong interest in ensuring that insurance companies are adequately capitalized, but I don’t understand the state interest in directly regulating premium prices. (Or is that not what you are referring to?)

Every state requires you to hold some minimum level of car insurance, mortgages require a level of homeowners insurance, etc. The underlying problem is that it's a significant barrier for people if they get priced out of the market (even if it's for good reason). If you can't afford car insurance or no insurers will offer it to you then you legally cannot drive a car, and in the US that becomes a problem that spirals into bigger problems.

I would say overall there's no good answer to this problem that everybody would be happy with, just maybe one you consider "less bad" than the other ones.

Post reply on HN