Comment by Panzer04
1 day ago
The people are risk pay less, all of the other people forced to participate in your general insurance pay more.
If I live in the middle of a city in an apartment block should I pay the same rates to insure against wildfire as someone in the middle of a dry forest? Probably not, but govenrment-mandated insurance programs force me to.
Premiums should be based on risk, not flat. I don't know where you are drawing that line of reasoning from. Just because the government is providing coverage doesn't mean it's all the same rate. Every insurance product has a risk model to set prices. I was just advocating that we have a non profit minded entity with deep pockets do it vs private companies motivated by maximizing profit.
Public benefit corps fit this model as do regulated utilities.
Edit: i think were talking past each other until agreeing that risk/cost/rates are being intentionally suppressed by or on behalf of the public. Kind if like this other housing related mortgage thing Ive heard if that may be mispriced/misstructured in favor of many at the expense of all.
I dont get it. Your argument is that if everything was priced accurately and aggregated "fairly" insurance would work. Ok, totally true statement. Very much the case that's not what is happening now for any of the example markets or gov programs.
You appear to believe "profit" is the problem, which is true in that negative profit is known as "loss" which is what has and will be occurring even with the public "last resort" rates. The private insurers are not withdrawing because their "fantastic" 6-15% margin on disaster insurance isnt enough. Using CA as an example they withdrew because 1) the state required they dont use risk based modeling for individual rates and 2) they dont include reinsurance costs as a rate signal. Shockingly their CA insurance pool turned upside down on costs/losses in a decade or two and they bailed.
FAIR is exactly the sort of or youre talking about; non profit government mandated insurance pool, open to all residents, with proportional policy/loss assignment, rates set based on regulated-interpretation-of-risk-exposure + costs, regulated by the CA Dept of Insurance. And yes, their policies are risk adjusted, but theyre not _accurate_. And yes, insurance should accurate according to risk and (payout) costs but basically none of the public last resort issuers can!
See again florida, national flood, etc. In every case 1) risk & cost modeling (accurate pricing) is suppressed on behalf of the public 2) risk prices/costs soon exceed private risk markets 3) private insurers withdraw 4) public "last resort" insurers emerge 5) risks/costs continue to grow, private insurers withdraw, the "last resort" insurer becomes the risk aggregating insurer 6) last resort insurer shockingly cant meet its commitments 7) public funds and/or backdoor insurance taxes socialize losses due to unprices disk.