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Is the world becoming uninsurable?

charleshughsmith.substack.com

991–1000 of 1001 posts

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#991
post #476

> The other way the world is becoming uninsurable is much of what we take for granted--abundant, affordable resources, products, food and fuel, for example--is not guaranteed, and cannot be insured by political or technological means. Fuel is not guaranteed, but renewables, batteries, heat pumps, EVs and possible nuclear does increasingly give us a technological option for ensuring power. It's fair to ask if economic…

I’m not sure how heat pumps and batteries “ensure power”. Building far more nuclear would create green jobs, high paying jobs, and ensure widespread power, but the current trend is to close nuclear power plants and burn natural gas instead.

If you're willing to put down 10-30k USD on solar and batteries, you can probably cut the cable.

At least most of the year, depending on where you live.

Yes, nuclear would be great, but the time to make that decision was 20 years ago.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#992

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?" The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

If you limit the range of disasters to US ones, maybe, but flooding is a big issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_European_floods

Coming from the UK, increased flooding has been an issue for 20+ years and still it's a bit taboo to maybe say it's climate change to older generations

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#993

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference. In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +…

> Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference. That’s moving the goal posts. You can always use a heatpump to heat a space. Any space you want to keep comfortable will always be easier if the outside is cooler than your target temperature. Everything in that space is going to produce heat as a natural consequen…

> You can always use a heatpump to heat a space.

I covered that in the rest of my post. Most of the time, heating involves a much bigger temperature gradient than cooling. And even though you can use a heat pump, most houses don't use one. (I love the tech personally). Meanwhile cooling always uses a heat pump, so almost every air-conditioned house is using more efficient tech than a heated house. While operating on a smaller temperature delta.

> There is no passive manner that can allow you to cool a space surrounded by a hotter space

Insulation works just as well to keep heat out as it does to keep heat in.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#994
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that we should consider most of the planet unlivable because disasters happen that aren't eternally and increasingly profitable to insure? Is it a bad thing that literally tens of millions of Americans would no longer have insurance? That you're asking double digit percents of the entire population to leave cities and just... what? Suddenly have new homes in a region with plen…

Most of the populated areas are perfectly safe from fire. https://wildfiretaskforce.org/updated-fire-hazard-severity-z...

Let's add hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis, monsoons, etc. You're being intentionally obtuse.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#995

American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?" The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.

I mean, the answer is obviously no as long as you allow insurance prices to rise accordingly. Insurance is always possible if you pay the right price for the given level of risk/cost; if you can't afford the insurance, you can't afford the risk.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#996
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re mostly talking about wildfires. The top 5 most destructive events in US are all hurricanes. They are the size of multiple states and bring more water in a period of a day than rest of annual non-hurricane rainfall. It’s desalinated water falling from a massive sprinkler in the sky.

You are right. I live in Europe and I'm not very familiar with hurricanes. I'm more familiar with fires and earthquakes. It seems some parts of Florida have been hit by catastrophes every 2-5 years. Maybe we should treat the whole space as natural reserves and building less there. I saw a lot of houses constructured right on the beach in Florida that they seemed just looking for trouble.

I am in Florida. We have Winter, Summer and Hurricane Season. It's an yearly thing. Hurricanes get stronger every year due to warming waters in Gulf of Mexico.

There are bigger Hurricanes in oceans but since no Humans live it doesn't make the news.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#997

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.

The national park service does controlled burns in Yosemite and has for a couple decades at this point. You can argue they don't do enough but they're limited by bureaucracy, safe conditions, and manpower rather than willingness.

National parks are a small percentage of California’s land area. Does the state do controlled burns outside of the national parks? If not, national parks doing controlled burns do not do very much.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#998
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything I have the exact same experience when discussing anything insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how much profit insurance companies a…

Health insurance's issue is probably how it induces pure waste everywhere as everyone has to play this dance of ever escalating paperwork which consumes a lot of labor. It's not profit, it's waste. Same with the ever increasing amount of admin. Why is that admin increasing? I estimate insurance or requirements created by insurance is part of the cause. There is also a lot of other smells of a lack of a competitive ma…

Honestly, health insurance has a lot wrong. Things like the 80/20 rule can create some weird incentives. Normally an insururer would want to minimize the costs of what they insure, but if non-claim overheads plus profit has reached 20%, then they can't negotiate lower costs without losing profit, and are actually incentivized to either get more claims or negotiate worse prices.

This is besides all the inefficiencies, and nonsense. For example even if a patent hypothetically knew exactly how long a procedure would go, exactly what personnel would be involed and how, exactly how much anesthesia/sutures/other billable supplies were used, and that there were no complications, and even if they know that no denial of coverage would happen, it is not structurally possible for them to know the out of pocket costs, except for the handful of surgeries that get treated as package deals. It would literally take dozens of hours of phone-calls to the hospital's and each provider's billing department to get the exact codes and amounts they would submit, and then trying to get insurance to price the hypothetical bill, or provide you with sufficient information to price it yourself. And obviously a bunch of the information we are assuming the patient has are unknowable until after the fact.

Part of the problem is insurance has a huge rule engine for deciding which line items are covered by not-allowable (meaning they get written off), plus insurance contract rates are only public for hospitals (so no info for providers that bill separate), and even then the data files don't always contain sufficient data to determine which of the multiple allowable rates for this procedure with this insurance at this facility, with these caveats actually applies).

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#999
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health insurance's issue is probably how it induces pure waste everywhere as everyone has to play this dance of ever escalating paperwork which consumes a lot of labor. It's not profit, it's waste. Same with the ever increasing amount of admin. Why is that admin increasing? I estimate insurance or requirements created by insurance is part of the cause. There is also a lot of other smells of a lack of a competitive ma…

Honestly, health insurance has a lot wrong. Things like the 80/20 rule can create some weird incentives. Normally an insururer would want to minimize the costs of what they insure, but if non-claim overheads plus profit has reached 20%, then they can't negotiate lower costs without losing profit, and are actually incentivized to either get more claims or negotiate worse prices. This is besides all the inefficiencies,…

There is a lot of stuff where this is not the case and pricing is still opaque or takes way too much effort. Like if I want to get a well defined CT scan or blood test. It's not as simple as going on amazon or many other retailers.

A few examples: I wanted to get a CAC scan that my insurance wouldn't cover. My insurance website said that a CAC scan would cost this much with my insurance, along with a total price that would be charged, covered or not. It was something like $80 total. I then called the place to get a CAC scan, and they said since the insurance didn't cover it, the price was $300, and there was no cash pay direct price where I could get it at the listed $80 price, even though they could hypothetically bill the insurance, and the insurance could just bill me the full price. The same place does not have a price listing; there is no online ordering I can do for the CAC scan, I needed to go through a permission process by talking to another doctor to even get the CAC scan in the first place. The fact I even needed to call people, and there was all this bullshit, to do direct cash pay for a simple scan is emblematic of a very broken system.

Or I want to get a blood draw for a blood test ordered by a doctor at one medical. They do not list the total price, even though that should be automated and very clear since it isn't a procedure that would have any 'complications'.

Even the simple shit is not clear at all and takes way more work than it needs.

Re: Is the world becoming uninsurable?

#1000

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so familiar with huge wind but a lot of water I got some (naive) ideas. Build much bigger sewer pipes and river beds. Build houses higher. As usual each region has his own problems. We can all agree either we move out of there or we invent ways to mitigate the problems. For the long term of course, as we all agree, reducing CO2 emissions, stop climate warming and trying to get back some CO2. I believe and hop…

> Build much bigger sewer pipes Great, now in a storm surge (which is the most destructive part of most hurricanes), you have built an effective system for transferring rising seawater into your urban area! > and river beds. Great, now you've completely eradicated the delicate ecosystem that was living there and everything that depends on it. > Build houses higher. That is how a lot of coastal houses are built. But n…

Please suggest alternative solutions then. Otherwise you are just a nihilist. If you want to be a nihilist you can do so, there is nothing but death that way so I won't follow you there. If you want to live, and have still hope, when you slash a solution, do come up with a better solution. Please suggest other solutions or ways that the problems you find with my solutions can be overcome.
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