271–280 of 712 posts
> “If your roof is 20 years old and one hailstorm is going to take it off, you should pay more than somebody with a brand new roof,” If you've been paying for insurance for 20 years with one company, then I'd say that is certainly a dick move to drop you right before it might pay out. What even is the point then?
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Apparently in your book anybody that isn't effectively negative on assets (everyone needs a place to live) is so rich they're not entitled to an opinion on insurance rates? This kind of weird aggro-dismissal seems like an inevitable result of "privilege" politics based around dragging everyone down to the lowest level. Having a place to live where one isn't burning heaps of money on rent should be our expected societ…
You can have whatever opinion you'd like about insurance rates, but if insurers are sustainably incurring losses, rates have to go up, one way or the other: either insurers raise their rates, or they exit the market, decreasing competition and raising rates. There's no way to moralize out of this! Regarding minor claims: I think what I've learned about homeowners insurance is: don't make minor claims. That's not what…
Personally my gripe is that I wish insurance companies would update what are seemingly quite obtuse pricing models, rather than pushing customers into invasive surveillance tech. For example I'd appreciate if it were possible to raise my deductibles by an order of magnitude and see a meaningful drop in premiums. But instead it seems like the only coverage knob that has an effect is the max coverage limit (which when you think about it, actually shouldn't even be a thing. the whole point of insurance is to cover the long tail risk). My gripe is a little more pronounced for auto, where I quoted out dropping the miles driven on one vehicle to nearly zero and it reduced premium by a mere 10%.
Re minor claims, maybe I'm underestimating how much future premiums went up after those somewhat frivolous homeowners claims I mentioned, and they effectively just ended up forming loans rather than affecting the overall expected value of losses.
If insurance is individually priced to this degree, what's the point of insurance?
If you can afford to rebuild your house after a fire, there will be no point (and there never was a point). Insurance has always been a negative-EV trade for the average person, but there have been mispricings that make it positive-EV when you have more information than the insurance company. However, the inefficiency meant that you also had to pay for the uncertainty on their estimate of your risk. With less uncerta…
Negative EV in terms of dollars, but not necessarily utility. For most people, a 1% chance of losing their $500k home is worse than paying a $5100 premium.
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> Why would insurance being individually priced negate its value? Perfectly accurate insurance pricing would be for each policy to cost exactly the amount of covered losses in the period covered plus the overhead of managing the insurance, which obviously would be pointless.
That wouldn't be pointless, because you would have a predictable expense instead of an unpredictable expense. What you're describing is actually the ideal scenario for both individuals and companies.
What I'd expect is that you pay into the pool and then after 20 years you've more than paid for the new roof and so you get a new roof.
It should be slightly stochastic financing of your new roof and since a roof has a finite lifetime there should be a new roof at the end of it. It shouldn't be "hey, looks like your roof is about to have issues now, and we only insure new roofs, thanks for the profits, byeeeeee...."
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I recently started going through many big data collectors and expressing my rights to know, delete, and stop selling my information. Verisk makes the process notoriously difficult compared to other companies, you have to start an "ethics" report in their ticketing system https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/69464/ind...
Real question: is something like aerial photography of your roof really subject to privacy laws?
In contrast, if you set up a high fence around your pool in order to sunbathe naked, aerial photography would probably be an invasion of your privacy? If your roof was designed in a similar way, one might be able to argue it was wrong for the company to observe aspects of it without permission. (Although they might have gotten permission via the insurance contract...)
I think this legal standard becomes tricky (or at least ought to receive more scrutiny) when we start talking about pervasiveness and permanence. Just because I know that an arbitrary person might take a picture of me in public doesn't mean I expect every single thing I do outside to be recorded forever by a technological invisible stalker hovering over my shoulder at every outdoor moment.
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I recently started going through many big data collectors and expressing my rights to know, delete, and stop selling my information. Verisk makes the process notoriously difficult compared to other companies, you have to start an "ethics" report in their ticketing system https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/69464/ind...
I’ve thought about doing this myself and I wish there was a service that made it easier. The one thing in the back of my mind is also that there’s a risk of this backfiring over time. When you are unknown to potential creditors, employers, etc in whatever platforms they choose to use to look you up, that’s the ultimate sign of risk.
Insurance bothers me for a few reasons: 1. What pisses me off more than anything else, it enables fraud that otherwise wouldn't exist. People manufacturing calamities and then claiming insurance allows dishonest people to get ahead in life over people who are honest and concerned enough about the future to buy insurance. Additionally, insurance fraud is net bad relative to other types of fraud because it encourages c…
> So, a company allegedly tasked with helping the public live safely wanted me to, at the time, ask my COVID infected host to waltz in to the doctor's office and spread around a pathogen that could kill patients. Nice. No. That is done over the phone or video chat. Not required to physically attend a doctors appointment in order to obtain a doctors note for COVID infection. It's called telemedicine or virtual consult…
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I recently started going through many big data collectors and expressing my rights to know, delete, and stop selling my information. Verisk makes the process notoriously difficult compared to other companies, you have to start an "ethics" report in their ticketing system https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/69464/ind...
Real question: is something like aerial photography of your roof really subject to privacy laws?
I'm less concerned about the spying and more concerned about insurance companies arbitrarily non-renewing policies with no recourse for the consumer. Insurance is heavily regulated for good reason, and insurance should be a source of stability instead of anxiety.
What you can do, which the U.S. already does, is government-run insurance, socializing the losses among a population. Flood insurance, for example.
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If this were true, health insurers would have taken a cudgel to the US hospital system decades ago and come up with a more efficient system. They haven't because an opaque system allows them to maintain their own opaque practices.
Health insurance companies don’t care about what your doctor earns in the same way home insurance companies don’t care about the cost of the roofer. They’re going to price in whatever that cost may be and call it a day. Health insurance has it easier too because there’s not really a concept of correlated risk in human populations. Most people do a decent job avoiding hurting themselves but when a flood comes, there’s…