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What really ticks me off is there are seemingly no levers to pull to financially convey to an insurance company that I will only ever call them for a large cata

What really ticks me off is there are seemingly no levers to pull to financially convey to an insurance company that I will only ever call them for a large catastrophic loss. Raising deductibles on car or home affects the rates very little. Meanwhile I've seen friends call their insurance companies to handle ice dams, oil burner blowbacks, getting a new roof ("wind damage"), or the inevitable water catastrophe in a finished basement. I suppose their rates go up later to compensate, but it still feels like I myself am not ever going to be contributing to the bulk of claims. I'm honestly quite close to just saying no thank you to home insurance, but the things stopping me would be the lack of liability protection (even though once again I'm very low on the risk side here), plus the anti competitive scheme they've set up whereby if you go uninsured for a bit, then that's a black mark against you in the future. Perhaps there could be some wiggle room with deeding the house to a trust/LLC and then back (so that during my personal ownership it was never uninsured), but I haven't taken the time to really think that through. Another thing that needs to happen is a statutory maximum for property damage liability to passenger cars. We've always had expensive vehicles on the road, but they've traditionally been heavy working vehicles and easy to fix. Whereas now, if you've made the choice to drive around an aluminum framed car that is going to require expensive disassembly, inspection, and rework for what would have otherwise been a fender bender, then you yourself should be paying the increased premiums to cover that cost. Also, (obviously) the health care extortion racket needs to be set straight. It feels like one of the big reasons healthcare providers bill fraudulent prices is because of the big payday when auto insurance gets stuck paying.

asdaq1312512 3y ago
A similar thought has led me to a telemetry-enabled car liability insurance. I simply did not want to compensate others for risky driving. Telemetry-enabled insurances offer you a huge discount when you're driving "safe" - in case of my insurance, that was determined by speeds driven, acceleration and speed in curves.
- mindslight 3y ago
  oof. That's certainly what the reps and suits are pushing, continual surveillance plus unaccountable black box "AI" for a "discount" instead of doing the work to make their models accurately price risk [0]. And I'm sure it'll be inescapable as surveillance culture marches ever on. Eventually the financial pain of opting out of surveillance will be untenable for most. But at this point in time, unequivocally, fuck that noise. It also suffers from the same misguided metric problem inherent to all surveillance based behavior conditioning. Speed in curves and acceleration are more like evidence of someone driving actively rather than driving poorly - ie paying attention and not texting/phoning/spacing out/etc as if they're in some living room on wheels. But those things are easy to measure and scare the typical middling slushbox SUV driver, so here we are. There's a point to be made for speed (kinetic energy), but I'd still say that someone driving the usual prevailing speed on the highway is being much safer than driving slow and being a moving hazard. In fact now that I'm thinking about it I'm left wondering if part of the reason for so many terrible drivers these days is this surveillance based insurance. Because I doubt the nanny watchers are knocking people for things like camping in the middle lanes of highways while going below the speed limit. [0] I've got a second car that I had been leaving insured while meaning to get it back on the road some day, but even dropping the miles driven on that to near zero affected its rates very little. I ended up just giving in and dropping the coverage.
everforward 3y ago
> What really ticks me off is there are seemingly no levers to pull to financially convey to an insurance company that I will only ever call them for a large catastrophic loss. Raising deductibles on car or home affects the rates very little. This doesn't really surprise me. I suspect the vast majority of their payout dollars go to catastrophic loss. It takes a _lot_ of small claims to add up to the same amount as a total loss (value of the house, value of the stuff inside, cost of temporary housing, etc). I don't think they're cheating you the way you think they are. I used to work for a very large insurance company that had a line of home insurance. We made almost nothing on premiums, we paid out basically every dollar we got in premiums. Our profitable line of business was investing the premiums we collected until we had to pay them out. That seemed a very fair deal to me. The company manages and orchestrates spreading the risk among members in exchange for the profits from investing premiums. Customers are only "losing" what they could have gained by investing the money, which would be a crazy thing to do instead of getting insurance. > Whereas now, if you've made the choice to drive around an aluminum framed car that is going to require expensive disassembly, inspection, and rework for what would have otherwise been a fender bender, then you yourself should be paying the increased premiums to cover that cost. I wonder what the impact would be spread across the insurance pool. I bet it's not that much. Honestly, if I were going to guess, I would wager that medical bills are the vast majority of auto insurance payouts. Even expensive cars are cheap relative to an ICU visit. $100k cars on the road are uncommon, but every single person on or near a road could rack up a few million in medical debt.

asdaq1312512 3y ago

A similar thought has led me to a telemetry-enabled car liability insurance. I simply did not want to compensate others for risky driving. Telemetry-enabled insurances offer you a huge discount when you're driving "safe" - in case of my insurance, that was determined by speeds driven, acceleration and speed in curves.

mindslight 3y ago
oof. That's certainly what the reps and suits are pushing, continual surveillance plus unaccountable black box "AI" for a "discount" instead of doing the work to make their models accurately price risk [0]. And I'm sure it'll be inescapable as surveillance culture marches ever on. Eventually the financial pain of opting out of surveillance will be untenable for most. But at this point in time, unequivocally, fuck that noise. It also suffers from the same misguided metric problem inherent to all surveillance based behavior conditioning. Speed in curves and acceleration are more like evidence of someone driving actively rather than driving poorly - ie paying attention and not texting/phoning/spacing out/etc as if they're in some living room on wheels. But those things are easy to measure and scare the typical middling slushbox SUV driver, so here we are. There's a point to be made for speed (kinetic energy), but I'd still say that someone driving the usual prevailing speed on the highway is being much safer than driving slow and being a moving hazard. In fact now that I'm thinking about it I'm left wondering if part of the reason for so many terrible drivers these days is this surveillance based insurance. Because I doubt the nanny watchers are knocking people for things like camping in the middle lanes of highways while going below the speed limit. [0] I've got a second car that I had been leaving insured while meaning to get it back on the road some day, but even dropping the miles driven on that to near zero affected its rates very little. I ended up just giving in and dropping the coverage.

everforward 3y ago

> What really ticks me off is there are seemingly no levers to pull to financially convey to an insurance company that I will only ever call them for a large catastrophic loss. Raising deductibles on car or home affects the rates very little. This doesn't really surprise me. I suspect the vast majority of their payout dollars go to catastrophic loss. It takes a _lot_ of small claims to add up to the same amount as a total loss (value of the house, value of the stuff inside, cost of temporary housing, etc). I don't think they're cheating you the way you think they are. I used to work for a very large insurance company that had a line of home insurance. We made almost nothing on premiums, we paid out basically every dollar we got in premiums. Our profitable line of business was investing the premiums we collected until we had to pay them out. That seemed a very fair deal to me. The company manages and orchestrates spreading the risk among members in exchange for the profits from investing premiums. Customers are only "losing" what they could have gained by investing the money, which would be a crazy thing to do instead of getting insurance. > Whereas now, if you've made the choice to drive around an aluminum framed car that is going to require expensive disassembly, inspection, and rework for what would have otherwise been a fender bender, then you yourself should be paying the increased premiums to cover that cost. I wonder what the impact would be spread across the insurance pool. I bet it's not that much. Honestly, if I were going to guess, I would wager that medical bills are the vast majority of auto insurance payouts. Even expensive cars are cheap relative to an ICU visit. $100k cars on the road are uncommon, but every single person on or near a road could rack up a few million in medical debt.