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Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

wsj.com

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Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#511

Post by derwiki »

pants2 wrote: post #375
imgabe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that in some cases the information is inaccurate and there are sometimes limited avenues for a customer to object if their insurance is cancelled based on inaccurate information. To the extent that the information is accurate, I agree. If you make an agreement with a company and buy insurance based on your statement that you don't have a pool, but then you do have a pool, I don't see any reason w…

Last time I was shopping for home insurance, an agent told me I was too close to a canyon, which I thought was strange because there are no canyons near me. They sent me a screenshot of the fire danger map where clearly it had the wrong location / coordinates for my address (they thought I was about a mile from where I really live). I pointed them to my address on Google Maps which has my correct location, but they s…

Reminds me of a few years back when my dad tried to get ATT DSL for my grandpa’s house. ATT told him they couldn’t find his address with their system. My dad reminded ATT they had a landline through ATT for fifty years. “Sorry, different system.” Got cable internet instead.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#512

Post by Kalium »

hnburnsy wrote: post #392

I wish insurance was more flexible with risk and deductibles, 20 year old roof, your deductible is 20000, 5 year old roof your deductible is 500, something that equalizes the risk without the need to drop customers. Heck I would self insure or set an extremely high deductible for rebuilding, but I still need coverage for any liability risk like when the mailman trips on my sidewalk.

That's only possible when the regulatory environment allows it. If your insurance regulators won't allow that kind of flexibility, then they have to look for other options.

This is often approached through the lens of consumer protection. As a result, making thing flexible to allow insurance companies to say "Hey, you really need a new roof, but if you choose not to here's the price of that risk" is not prioritized. Approving rate increases is.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#513

Post by aqfamnzc »

harimau777 wrote: post #495
potatolicious wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year" More importantly, each person in this group has a different chance of a million-dollar loss each year, and it's important if you're going to write a policy to get that chance as accurate as possible. Some members of the pool have a 1-in-1000 chance per year, others have a 1-in-10 chance. An efficient insuran…

Wouldn't an efficient insurance market be worthless since the expected net payout for everyone insured would trend to zero?

No, it's still very valuable since I'll never have to pay out of pocket for that million-dollar incident. The point isn't to save money, it's to distribute the incident payments over a long term.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#514

Post by autoexec »

pants2 wrote: post #375
imgabe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that in some cases the information is inaccurate and there are sometimes limited avenues for a customer to object if their insurance is cancelled based on inaccurate information. To the extent that the information is accurate, I agree. If you make an agreement with a company and buy insurance based on your statement that you don't have a pool, but then you do have a pool, I don't see any reason w…

Last time I was shopping for home insurance, an agent told me I was too close to a canyon, which I thought was strange because there are no canyons near me. They sent me a screenshot of the fire danger map where clearly it had the wrong location / coordinates for my address (they thought I was about a mile from where I really live). I pointed them to my address on Google Maps which has my correct location, but they s…

Thank goodness you learned early that those other insurance companies were incompetent and unwilling to work with their customers even in the face of obvious mistakes on their part. If they had accepted you, you wouldn't want to have had to deal with trying to get money out of them, especially when you'd already be dealing with a stressful situation. They really did you a favor by rejecting you, and you now know to stay away from them when it comes to other types of insurance too.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#515

Post by autoexec »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #467
imgabe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that in some cases the information is inaccurate and there are sometimes limited avenues for a customer to object if their insurance is cancelled based on inaccurate information. To the extent that the information is accurate, I agree. If you make an agreement with a company and buy insurance based on your statement that you don't have a pool, but then you do have a pool, I don't see any reason w…

> if their insurance is cancelled based on inaccurate information I see this type of comment on HN too often. Some hypothetical bullshit scenario followed by a BIG if. Armchair quarterback type of comment. In all highly advanced countries (G7 and similar), insurance is insanely strictly regulated. If they cancel your policy for a b/s reason, and your protests are ignored, then tell the regulators. They will fix it qu…

> I see this type of comment on HN too often. Some hypothetical bullshit scenario followed by a BIG if. Armchair quarterback type of comment. In all highly advanced countries (G7 and similar), insurance is insanely strictly regulated. If they cancel your policy for a b/s reason, and your protests are ignored, then tell the regulators. They will fix it quickly and slap a huge fine on the insurer.

Except that according to the article this "hypothetical bullshit scenario" is already happening and there are even several examples of it happening including one where a person was rejected for the condition of their roof when the roof was brand new, and another where a person was rejected because of trees that were nothing more than shadows.

Since you know that it's so easy to "tell regulators" and get things fixed quickly you should reach out to Douglas Heller, the director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America, because he's under the impression that “The technology is way ahead of any consumer protections” and consumer groups feel that inspections via aerial images are "worrisome because of the limited rights customers have to challenge the images"

You can find Mr. Heller here (https://consumerfed.org/expert/douglas-heller/). I'm sure Douglas would love to learn about how none of this is a problem because "insurance is insanely strictly regulated" and your expertise would mean that he can better help the people currently struggling with this issue and potentially even save others from having to deal with it in the future.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#516

Post by Noumenon72 »

shpx wrote: post #503
compiler-guy wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It’s a risk pooling mechanism. If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year, then their annual premium will be: 10 x 0.001 x $1,000,000 = $10,000 (plus some administrative overhead and assuming a very basic risk model) It has nothing to do with who is rich and who is poor or making anyone come out ahead of their own losses.

If insurance was just about pooling risk, an insurer that had perfect information about the future would pool everyone into a one-man pool and charge everyone the price of their damage for the year +1 cent for itself. But that's not what would happen. You would still have insurance because what we really have is 8 billion people in the world (or 300 million in America or 10 million in your state or 1 million in your…

I invite you to start selling an insurance product whose sales pitch is "You will get some utility from this product paying for other people's roofs!"

Is there some kind of theory of insurance they teach in business class where they explain this "discover the network" idea? It doesn't sound like the common definition of insurance at all.

I believe the perfect information case you say wouldn't happen is exactly what would happen. The only reason we have insurance is that perfect information is impossible in a chaotic world.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#517

Post by rendaw »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #389
pants2 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I was shopping for home insurance, an agent told me I was too close to a canyon, which I thought was strange because there are no canyons near me. They sent me a screenshot of the fire danger map where clearly it had the wrong location / coordinates for my address (they thought I was about a mile from where I really live). I pointed them to my address on Google Maps which has my correct location, but they s…

I wonder if there’s a small-claims court claim here. It’s sort of annoying to have to jump through this hoop, but this is the sort of situation where you have to make it the right person’s problem to get what you want.

I know it's not the EU, but under the GDPR you have a right to correct personal information. While you don't have a contract with them, it sounds like your information is in their database (for them to look up?). I wonder if that would be an avenue to fight this were this the EU?

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#518

Post by barsonme »

tptacek wrote: post #310
worik wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the culling Insurance companies are very keen to get as much risk as possible off their books before the climate gets even more extreme in its volatility Good goes with bad, so long as the bad goes, some good going too is undesirable but OK because they are aware if the catastrophic climate events looming The insurance companies are behaving logically, probably legally IANAL, but for people who are sim…

You (say) have a trampoline. I do not. We share an insurer. Our insurer asked, when you applied, if you had a trampoline. Your trampoline materially increases the risk that insurance is going to have to pay to cover a lawsuit on your property. You lied, and said you didn't. I am now paying to subsidize your trampoline. Why shouldn't I want them to be running drones over our houses? Worrying times... for pirate trampo…

> Why shouldn't I want them to be running drones over our houses?

Because it’s creepy.

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#519

Post by skissane »

Eisenstein wrote: post #507
skissane wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is the punitive damages which are really astronomically insane. But even merely compensatory damages in the US can be extremely high by the standards of other countries. For example, in the 2014 Florida case Cynthia Robinson v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, et al , the jury awarded US$23.6 billion in punitive damages as well as US$16.9 million in compensatory damages, for the death of the plaintiff's husband…

Pointing out outliers isn't really helpful when talking about what could be expected in an insurance claim.

Okay, but the point also remains with respect to averages.

For example, compare how the UK and the US handle compensation for lost future earnings in wrongful death cases. In the UK, judges are guided by the "Ogden tables", actuarial tables published by the British government. The judge will use the deceased's age to look up a multiplier in the tables, which will be multiplied by their income at the time of death, to derive a net present value of future earnings. While the tables are technically only a guideline, and judges have the discretion to deviate from them, plaintiffs rarely succeed in practice with convincing judges to do so.

By contrast, in the US, there are no such formal guidelines – it is largely determined by expert witness testimony before a jury. Expert witnesses have a lot of scope to argue for higher estimates, and often succeed in convincing a jury with those arguments. The result is unsurprising – compensation for lost future earnings is more generous in the US than in the UK.

http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28878/1/53.pd...

Re: Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

#520

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

d--b wrote: post #320

A legal question here: are we allowed to shoot down a drone that snoops over our house?

Full choke and magnum turkey loads.

If that doesn't work, there are tutorials on YouTube for building guided anti aircraft missiles.

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