Home insurers are dropping customers based on aerial images

Imagine if I put cameras all over a city that charged you $10 every time you exceeded the speed limit by 1 MPH. With an additional $10 fee for each additional MPH measure over the limit. Also, this is per camera, so if you pass 6 cameras on your commute going 70 in a 65, you’re getting a $300 penalty.

Rules are rules.

Yea I think that is exactly correct

Thats exactly the problem with insurance.

If I have any sort of risk mitigation (file backup, fire alarms, spare tire, a generator, whatever) I can test that it works periodically. So I know I'm actually safe for the event.

For insurance, you can't know what bullshit they'll come up with to deny a claim when the time comes for it.

You're left with having paid for the insurance all that time for nothing! Much better to have put that money in a piggy bank instead.

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 criminals to manufacture damage that wouldn't otherwise happen.

2. There is an obvious incentive for them to chase an endgame of knowing exactly whether you will cost them money or make them money. When they attain this, insurance simply becomes a fortune teller and an instruction manual for Living Without Calamity. If you're denied coverage, you're going to experience something calamitous. If you're accepted, you have the ability to be fine and don't need insurance, unless you aren't sure how to Live Without Calamity. When you are accepted, you're only covered if you surrender your agency and follow their instructions for Living Without Calamity. Basic things like travelers insurance have clauses that void your policy if you scuba dive past 30 feet on your trip.

3. Insurance policies can create toxic incentives for people that hurt society. I filed a claim with Generali travel insurance because my host tested positive for COVID with a take home test, and I canceled my trip. Their web portal indicated that my claim had been received and was awaiting processing. I called incessantly to confirm my claim was good, and was not able to get an answer after several calls that routed through incompetent-by-design help desk employees and into a voicemailbox of a claims processor. Weeks go by and I receive a voicemail from the person I had been trying to contact telling me that I needed a doctor's note confirming that the person had COVID, and a take home test would not suffice. 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. I guess they weren't medical insurance so they didn't care. And of course no doctor would retroactively go back in time and confirm that a person was positive for a sickness after they had already recovered.

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 changes approved. A literal quote for you during Covid was, “Son, I’m looking out my window at downtown {city} and I don’t see many cars on the road. We won’t approve the rate increases.”

This was with actual data of losses increasing due to supply chain disruption of auto parts, labor increases and many more things.

We basically had to write policies and hope for the best despite knowing the data / trend lines forecasting major losses.

Fast-forward and what do you have - major losses by all of these companies - and so these companies have two choices: - Try to get rate approvals - Exit the market or line of insurance

For California, the latter is the better option because at least for auto you cannot use credit, telematics or other very predictive attributes to price the risk. This results in essentially pooled risk which in aggregate drives up rates for all. Simply put, California officials did this to themselves.

For other states, the first option works but the rate increases are now significantly higher because it was near impossible to get any adequate rate increases last few years.

So, the bill has come due and it sucks for everyone as it’s either a) higher prices or b) can’t get insurance (Florida folks for certain types) or c) limited suppliers not being able to get reinsurance to share the risk results in higher rates that customers can’t afford so they go without.