Comment by TeMPOraL

What I learned from this thread is that in the US, apparently, the government is preventing insurance companies from raising the rates, because the rates corresponding to actual risk and damages would be stupidly big, insurers have no choice but to quit the market and then even the wealthiest homeowners can't get insurance at any price.

So what's stopping insurance companies from inventing some kind of fractional insurance? I.e. if insuring a 200sqm house at real rates would be stupidly expensive to anyone but the top 5% wealthiest owners, then instead of quitting the market, why not create a policy that insures the whole house but covers only N sqm from it, priced at real rate / sqm, and it's up to the buyer to decide on N? This way the wealthiest would still have access, everyone else would sort of have it on paper, but it would create space for innovations (and "innovations") in figuring out how to cover the whole thing for regular people - and long-term, incentives for better building and moving elsewhere.

Markets have powerful mechanisms for changing peoples' behavior, but don't work at all in binary "take it or leave it" situations.