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It’s an issue of scale. Similar to police tracking phones. Police have always been able to assign an officer to follow a suspect, but it’s expensive and therefo

It’s an issue of scale. Similar to police tracking phones. Police have always been able to assign an officer to follow a suspect, but it’s expensive and therefore rarely done. If insurance companies can cheaply inspect everyone’s house from space, the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition and raise them for everyone else. This is potentially problematic because the people with houses in poor condition are the least able to afford added costs in general.

tptacek 3y ago
Why is it not a good thing if insurance is more accurately priced? Insurance isn't a redistribution mechanism. And dilapidated roofs aren't a social good. Municipalities have actual redistribution schemes to make these kinds of repairs. I'll note that there's nothing at all redistributive about sneaking a trampoline onto your property, too. Further, I'll note that working class people also take pride in their houses and pay to keep them up, and they too are being asked to subsidize people who are getting rate breaks from false assessments. Later My municipality will make an interest-free loan of up to $25,000 to cover the kinds of property repairs we're discussing, if you're income-qualified (ie: not too rich to just pay to replace your own roof).
- drekipus 3y ago
  Isn't insurance entirely a redistribution mechanism?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Not in the sense evoked by customer purchasing power.
  - compiler-guy 3y ago
    No. It’s a risk pooling mechanism. If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year, then their annual premium will be: 10 x 0.001 x $1,000,000 = $10,000 (plus some administrative overhead and assuming a very basic risk model) It has nothing to do with who is rich and who is poor or making anyone come out ahead of their own losses.
    - potatolicious 3y ago
      > "If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year" More importantly, each person in this group has a different chance of a million-dollar loss each year, and it's important if you're going to write a policy to get that chance as accurate as possible. Some members of the pool have a 1-in-1000 chance per year, others have a 1-in-10 chance. An efficient insurance market assess who has what risk, and offers premium commensurate with risk. If you're one of the 1-in-10 people you pay more. A risk pool combines resources to pay out for losses that are otherwise individually unaffordable by each member of the pool. It is explicitly not a mechanism - nor is the intent to - have members with wildly different risk exposure pay the same premium. In fact the only way it can sustainably function is if each member's risk level is accurately gauged to some level of precision. There are risk pools where the intent is to subsidize higher-risk members, where we believe that such subsidy is a social good - health insurance for example is one of those things. But I don't see a good argument that home insurance is, or should be, one of these types of risk pools.
      - harimau777 3y ago
        Wouldn't an efficient insurance market be worthless since the expected net payout for everyone insured would trend to zero?
        jfim 3y ago
        The EV of insurance is negative, in the sense that the expected money that one can expect to get out of insurance is less than the premium. Insurance is for catastrophic losses. I don't pay for insurance to make a profit, I make it to avoid the large tail loss of having the house destroyed and having to pay the value of the mortgage to the bank.
        aqfamnzc 3y ago
        No, it's still very valuable since I'll never have to pay out of pocket for that million-dollar incident. The point isn't to save money, it's to distribute the incident payments over a long term.
- smodo 3y ago
  Lol that’s precisely what it is. It redistributes the cost of accidents. Across all its members, paid forward. Just don’t get insurance and nothing of yours will pay for anything belonging to anybody else.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    No, it's not. The idea of a risk pool is that everyone's catastrophic risks cancel out, not that people who replace their roofs also chip in to cover hail and water damage for people who don't.
    - shawndrost 3y ago
      In fact, you are wrong; insurance in California is redistributive by regulatory design. Farmers (when operating in CA) must offer insurance X% of homeowners in a range of $Y-$Z, subsidizing those customers who are more expensive to Farmers. It's relevant to the story: Farmers is disallowed (for political reasons) from canceling accounts in Auburn due to actuarial climate updates; Farmers has new incentives to closely scrutinize home conditions and utilize any new datasets.
      - loeg 3y ago
        This quirk of California law (that insurers cannot factor in climate risk or anything other than trailing 20 year average costs) is why insurers are pulling out of the state; it isn't generally true of insurance.
        timr 3y ago
        It also doesn't have anything explicitly to do with "actuarial climate updates" -- there have been a bunch of correlated losses recently (i.e. fires in 2017-2018) that mean that the insurers are losing money on people who live in certain high-risk places in California. Calling it "climate" just window dressing for local politics. California won't let them underwrite to accurately reflect the location risk, so they're pulling out instead. It's basically exactly what Tptacek said, only demonstrating it via the stupidity of California's law.
- rolandog 3y ago
  Because everything is turned as a cash-grab by corporations and prices never go down.
  - dgoldstein0 3y ago
    In some states insurance rates are regulated. Definitely know they are in California. That said whether the regulators are effective in keeping costs down is a different issue. But my not-very-deep understanding is that risks are rising, e.g. large wildfires in the US West, and increased hurricane frequency and strength on the Gulf Coast, and the only way to deal with that for the insurers is to raise prices, or drop customers - sometimes to the point of abandoning the market altogether. This sounds like another piece in that trend.
  - paulddraper 3y ago
    But inflation is good TM
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    You've never seen anything on sale?
- sarchertech 3y ago
  I’m not arguing what insurance should be I’m merely talking about the end result of this technology. I guarantee you income is correlated with state of home repair. If insurance companies can more easily access state of repair, lower income individuals will end up paying more than they did previously. Regardless of whether that is fair, it is a change from the status quo, and it’s obvious why some people would consider that problematic.
- rvba 3y ago
  You describe theory. In practice, the price will not drop for you at all, but will increase much for others, or they will be unable to get insurance. In fact your price will propably increase since more overhead needs to be allocated to fewer customers.
- mindslight 3y ago
  It's incorrect to assume that more data points implies more accurate pricing, as we're talking about very limited very simplistic models. It's more plausible to envision those extra data points serving to confuse the market and make it less competitive, rather than actually helping to accurately price risk. Every new data point partitions the statistical population size into two smaller parts, each with their own larger variance (ie the insurance company's risk). The insurance company could statistically combine the risk from each partition into the same original, but it's more likely they'll focus on the higher independent risk figures and raise premiums an outsized amount to cover each individually. And this effect is going to be more pronounced the more lopsided the partition is, leading to similar monoculture incentives as we see in the mortgage/housing bubble. For example, I'd bet there's somewhat of a correlation between insurance claims and whether a house is painted beige. That is how rates can go up even when the extra data is fundamentally sound. But there can also be just enough extra information to be damning, but not enough to exonerate. For example after the "Do you have a trampoline" question, is there a follow up of "Do you let guests use it" ? Or perhaps a more formal "opt out of all liability coverage for the trampoline" ? Likely not. Then of course there are places where the model is irrelevant or even outright wrong, because the thing being singled out seems like it rocks the boat. Like the driver surveillance devices that penalize focused acceleration due to perceived association with racing, when it's much more likely that the driver is actually paying attention to driving. Or penalizing people for going over the posted speed limit, when it's actually safer to go the prevailing speed of the road.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I didn't say anything about more data points. I'm talking about insurers being able to properly gauge whether existing customers are adhering to the terms of their policy, or whether they're free-riding off the premiums of their neighbors by defrauding the insurer.
    - mindslight 3y ago
      By "more data points" I meant questions like "Do you have a trampoline?". Read my comment again with that understanding. Elaborating on my second criticism - let's say someone has a trampoline but never has guests at their house. The insurance company asks about the first condition, but doesn't ask about the second condition. If the customer lies about having a trampoline, it's likely that they are actually still being subsidized by their neighbors as their overall risk of liability claims is much lower. And I've actually got to wonder if lying about having a trampoline is technically even fraud. Are home insurance companies legally obligated to pay/defend liability claims stemming from things you lied about? If not, then it would seem there is no fraud (unless you also lie for the claim) - the claim can just be denied, and liability coverage isn't relied upon by a mortgage.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Why is it not a good thing if insurance is more accurately priced? Another poster here, Scoundreller, recently responded to one of my comments on another topic with this insight: > The funny thing about insurance is that as it becomes perfect at assessing risk, it becomes worthless. > Oh, you’re about to have a $x claim this year, your premium is $x + y% admin fee. > Just self insure and save yourself the y%. There's likely a point where the more accurately priced a policy is the less worthwhile that policy is to purchase, which really wouldn't be a good thing for the insurance industry. The use of aerial photography probably isn't enough to put them over that threshold, but the closer they get, the less attractive their offerings will be. Considering that the insurance companies mentioned in the article have billions in revenue and assets I'm not sure they have a compelling need to resort to this level of surveillance in order to make good money. None of them appear to be going broke due to rogue trampolines anyway.
  - PurestGuava 3y ago
    That argument is silly because it misunderstands what "risk" means both in an insurance context and in general. Yes, if you could 100% guarantee that someone was going to have a $Y valued claim, their premium would fairly be 100% of $Y at least in order to allow for their contribution to the risk pool. Problem is, you cannot 100% predict the future, and there is no model capable of doing so, nor will there likely ever be. Nor can you predict that any other insured risk might not materialise in the meantime. More to the point, it fundamentally misunderstands what insurance is and how it works, not least the commercial considerations involved. If there is a 100% risk of risk X materialising, the insurer won't rate your premium at the cost of risk X; it will simply exclude risk X from your policy and rate your premium based on all the other myriad risks that might arise that year in an attempt to win your business and collect premium for what, to them, is a better bet. This already happens, incidentally; travel insurance policies will exclude pre-existing conditions or recurrences of previous illnesses as a matter of course, because if someone (e.g.) has cancer, the odds of them needing to claim on their policy - and as such draw down from the pool more than they paid in premium - skyrocket.
    - autoexec 3y ago
- Calavar 3y ago
  > Insurance isn't a redistribution mechanism That's exactly what insurance is. The whole premise is that they will dip into other people's payments to pay you if you ever encounter a covered issue. If insurance only ever paid you back some fraction X of your own contributions, why would you ever buy it? It would make infinitely more sense to deposit whatever you would have paid to insurance in a high yield savings account.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Read downthread for repeated explanations of how insurance works. You know you're in trouble when you profess shock that insurance has negative expected dollar value.
    - Calavar 3y ago
      On the contrary, I think using expected value to explain the value of insurance from the perspective of an insurance holder is a misunderstanding of insurance. People don't buy insurance to optimize the average case; they buy it to optimize the worst case. But an insurance policy that doesn't redistribute wealth has both negative expected value and negative value in the event of a payout. At which point it is just a personal rainy-day fund held in a savings account with a negative interest rate.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        Insurance almost mathematically must be negative EV in dollar terms. It's positive EV in utility terms because of the declining marginal utility of a dollar. If it was dollarwise positive EV, every insurer would be insolvent. This is pretty basic? Like, it's an economics frequently asked question why buying an insurance policy isn't as irrational as playing the lottery, since both have negative dollar EV.
        Calavar 3y ago
        You're moving away from the original question, which is does insurance redistribute wealth. If you get an insurance payout and that payout doesn't involve redistribution of wealth, then it means that the payout must come only from your premium payments, minus admin fees and profit margin. But that's not how insurance works. There are innumerable examples of people who received more in insurance payouts then they've ever paid in in premiums.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition I'm not that optimistic.
non-chalad 3y ago
The solution seems to be to remove the insurance mandate, and allow purchasing insurance across state lines. That way two locked-in markets are opened to more competition.
- delecti 3y ago
  Effectively removing the ability of states to regulate businesses in their own jurisdiction.
  - datascienced 3y ago
    How is it different from someone outside CA buying Google ads?
    - delecti 3y ago
      It's so completely and utterly different that I'm not even sure what comparison you're making.
- tptacek 3y ago
  What insurance mandate?
  - non-chalad 3y ago
    Any insurance mandate.
Kalium 3y ago
At the risk of being callous, the goal of home insurance is to assess and manage risk. Choosing ignorance in the interests of giving some people a subsidy on the assumption that they may be poorer does not further these goals in any way I can see. If the goal is redistribution, then using accurate risk data as a starting point seems preferable.
- AdieuToLogic 3y ago
  > At the risk of being callous, the goal of home insurance is to assess and manage risk. No, risk assessment and/or management is an internal operational concern. The goal of insurance providers, home or otherwise, is to charge fees such that the insurer collects as much revenue as possible while simultaneously expending as little as possible to remedy claims. Any justification legally available to an insurer supporting denying or reducing a claim will be employed.
  - Too 3y ago
    If your insurers goal is revenue i suggest you go look for a new mutual insurance. (no, this is not some hippie collective thing, in many countries this is the norm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance)
    - PurestGuava 3y ago
      An insurance mutual's goal is still revenue. Your own link spells it out - it still tries to make a profit, it's just that whatever profit arises gets redistributed to policy holders or others. It still has to respond to commercial pressures and the need to run a sustainable business in the same way as any firm. It's a common misconception that co-operatives/mutuals somehow don't need to make money or will actively try to not make money, but in reality if they don't they tend to die fairly quickly.
jjav 3y ago
> the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition Nobody will see lower prices. Perhaps these perfect homes might see slightly smaller increases year to year. > houses in poor condition The point of the thread is that they're dropping people for random noise in satellite photos. The house might be perfect, it's just the photo that's wrong. But they don't care.

tptacek 3y ago

Why is it not a good thing if insurance is more accurately priced? Insurance isn't a redistribution mechanism. And dilapidated roofs aren't a social good. Municipalities have actual redistribution schemes to make these kinds of repairs. I'll note that there's nothing at all redistributive about sneaking a trampoline onto your property, too. Further, I'll note that working class people also take pride in their houses and pay to keep them up, and they too are being asked to subsidize people who are getting rate breaks from false assessments. Later My municipality will make an interest-free loan of up to $25,000 to cover the kinds of property repairs we're discussing, if you're income-qualified (ie: not too rich to just pay to replace your own roof).

drekipus 3y ago
Isn't insurance entirely a redistribution mechanism?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Not in the sense evoked by customer purchasing power.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  No. It’s a risk pooling mechanism. If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year, then their annual premium will be: 10 x 0.001 x $1,000,000 = $10,000 (plus some administrative overhead and assuming a very basic risk model) It has nothing to do with who is rich and who is poor or making anyone come out ahead of their own losses.
  - potatolicious 3y ago
    > "If a group of ten people all have a one in one-thousand per year chance of a million-dollar loss each year" More importantly, each person in this group has a different chance of a million-dollar loss each year, and it's important if you're going to write a policy to get that chance as accurate as possible. Some members of the pool have a 1-in-1000 chance per year, others have a 1-in-10 chance. An efficient insurance market assess who has what risk, and offers premium commensurate with risk. If you're one of the 1-in-10 people you pay more. A risk pool combines resources to pay out for losses that are otherwise individually unaffordable by each member of the pool. It is explicitly not a mechanism - nor is the intent to - have members with wildly different risk exposure pay the same premium. In fact the only way it can sustainably function is if each member's risk level is accurately gauged to some level of precision. There are risk pools where the intent is to subsidize higher-risk members, where we believe that such subsidy is a social good - health insurance for example is one of those things. But I don't see a good argument that home insurance is, or should be, one of these types of risk pools.
    - harimau777 3y ago
      Wouldn't an efficient insurance market be worthless since the expected net payout for everyone insured would trend to zero?
      - jfim 3y ago
        The EV of insurance is negative, in the sense that the expected money that one can expect to get out of insurance is less than the premium. Insurance is for catastrophic losses. I don't pay for insurance to make a profit, I make it to avoid the large tail loss of having the house destroyed and having to pay the value of the mortgage to the bank.
      - aqfamnzc 3y ago
        No, it's still very valuable since I'll never have to pay out of pocket for that million-dollar incident. The point isn't to save money, it's to distribute the incident payments over a long term.
smodo 3y ago
Lol that’s precisely what it is. It redistributes the cost of accidents. Across all its members, paid forward. Just don’t get insurance and nothing of yours will pay for anything belonging to anybody else.
- tptacek 3y ago
  No, it's not. The idea of a risk pool is that everyone's catastrophic risks cancel out, not that people who replace their roofs also chip in to cover hail and water damage for people who don't.
  - shawndrost 3y ago
    In fact, you are wrong; insurance in California is redistributive by regulatory design. Farmers (when operating in CA) must offer insurance X% of homeowners in a range of $Y-$Z, subsidizing those customers who are more expensive to Farmers. It's relevant to the story: Farmers is disallowed (for political reasons) from canceling accounts in Auburn due to actuarial climate updates; Farmers has new incentives to closely scrutinize home conditions and utilize any new datasets.
    - loeg 3y ago
      This quirk of California law (that insurers cannot factor in climate risk or anything other than trailing 20 year average costs) is why insurers are pulling out of the state; it isn't generally true of insurance.
      - timr 3y ago
        It also doesn't have anything explicitly to do with "actuarial climate updates" -- there have been a bunch of correlated losses recently (i.e. fires in 2017-2018) that mean that the insurers are losing money on people who live in certain high-risk places in California. Calling it "climate" just window dressing for local politics. California won't let them underwrite to accurately reflect the location risk, so they're pulling out instead. It's basically exactly what Tptacek said, only demonstrating it via the stupidity of California's law.
rolandog 3y ago
Because everything is turned as a cash-grab by corporations and prices never go down.
- dgoldstein0 3y ago
  In some states insurance rates are regulated. Definitely know they are in California. That said whether the regulators are effective in keeping costs down is a different issue. But my not-very-deep understanding is that risks are rising, e.g. large wildfires in the US West, and increased hurricane frequency and strength on the Gulf Coast, and the only way to deal with that for the insurers is to raise prices, or drop customers - sometimes to the point of abandoning the market altogether. This sounds like another piece in that trend.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  But inflation is good TM
- WalterBright 3y ago
  You've never seen anything on sale?
sarchertech 3y ago
I’m not arguing what insurance should be I’m merely talking about the end result of this technology. I guarantee you income is correlated with state of home repair. If insurance companies can more easily access state of repair, lower income individuals will end up paying more than they did previously. Regardless of whether that is fair, it is a change from the status quo, and it’s obvious why some people would consider that problematic.
rvba 3y ago
You describe theory. In practice, the price will not drop for you at all, but will increase much for others, or they will be unable to get insurance. In fact your price will propably increase since more overhead needs to be allocated to fewer customers.
mindslight 3y ago
It's incorrect to assume that more data points implies more accurate pricing, as we're talking about very limited very simplistic models. It's more plausible to envision those extra data points serving to confuse the market and make it less competitive, rather than actually helping to accurately price risk. Every new data point partitions the statistical population size into two smaller parts, each with their own larger variance (ie the insurance company's risk). The insurance company could statistically combine the risk from each partition into the same original, but it's more likely they'll focus on the higher independent risk figures and raise premiums an outsized amount to cover each individually. And this effect is going to be more pronounced the more lopsided the partition is, leading to similar monoculture incentives as we see in the mortgage/housing bubble. For example, I'd bet there's somewhat of a correlation between insurance claims and whether a house is painted beige. That is how rates can go up even when the extra data is fundamentally sound. But there can also be just enough extra information to be damning, but not enough to exonerate. For example after the "Do you have a trampoline" question, is there a follow up of "Do you let guests use it" ? Or perhaps a more formal "opt out of all liability coverage for the trampoline" ? Likely not. Then of course there are places where the model is irrelevant or even outright wrong, because the thing being singled out seems like it rocks the boat. Like the driver surveillance devices that penalize focused acceleration due to perceived association with racing, when it's much more likely that the driver is actually paying attention to driving. Or penalizing people for going over the posted speed limit, when it's actually safer to go the prevailing speed of the road.
- tptacek 3y ago
  I didn't say anything about more data points. I'm talking about insurers being able to properly gauge whether existing customers are adhering to the terms of their policy, or whether they're free-riding off the premiums of their neighbors by defrauding the insurer.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    By "more data points" I meant questions like "Do you have a trampoline?". Read my comment again with that understanding. Elaborating on my second criticism - let's say someone has a trampoline but never has guests at their house. The insurance company asks about the first condition, but doesn't ask about the second condition. If the customer lies about having a trampoline, it's likely that they are actually still being subsidized by their neighbors as their overall risk of liability claims is much lower. And I've actually got to wonder if lying about having a trampoline is technically even fraud. Are home insurance companies legally obligated to pay/defend liability claims stemming from things you lied about? If not, then it would seem there is no fraud (unless you also lie for the claim) - the claim can just be denied, and liability coverage isn't relied upon by a mortgage.
autoexec 3y ago
> Why is it not a good thing if insurance is more accurately priced? Another poster here, Scoundreller, recently responded to one of my comments on another topic with this insight: > The funny thing about insurance is that as it becomes perfect at assessing risk, it becomes worthless. > Oh, you’re about to have a $x claim this year, your premium is $x + y% admin fee. > Just self insure and save yourself the y%. There's likely a point where the more accurately priced a policy is the less worthwhile that policy is to purchase, which really wouldn't be a good thing for the insurance industry. The use of aerial photography probably isn't enough to put them over that threshold, but the closer they get, the less attractive their offerings will be. Considering that the insurance companies mentioned in the article have billions in revenue and assets I'm not sure they have a compelling need to resort to this level of surveillance in order to make good money. None of them appear to be going broke due to rogue trampolines anyway.
- PurestGuava 3y ago
  That argument is silly because it misunderstands what "risk" means both in an insurance context and in general. Yes, if you could 100% guarantee that someone was going to have a $Y valued claim, their premium would fairly be 100% of $Y at least in order to allow for their contribution to the risk pool. Problem is, you cannot 100% predict the future, and there is no model capable of doing so, nor will there likely ever be. Nor can you predict that any other insured risk might not materialise in the meantime. More to the point, it fundamentally misunderstands what insurance is and how it works, not least the commercial considerations involved. If there is a 100% risk of risk X materialising, the insurer won't rate your premium at the cost of risk X; it will simply exclude risk X from your policy and rate your premium based on all the other myriad risks that might arise that year in an attempt to win your business and collect premium for what, to them, is a better bet. This already happens, incidentally; travel insurance policies will exclude pre-existing conditions or recurrences of previous illnesses as a matter of course, because if someone (e.g.) has cancer, the odds of them needing to claim on their policy - and as such draw down from the pool more than they paid in premium - skyrocket.
  - autoexec 3y ago
Calavar 3y ago
> Insurance isn't a redistribution mechanism That's exactly what insurance is. The whole premise is that they will dip into other people's payments to pay you if you ever encounter a covered issue. If insurance only ever paid you back some fraction X of your own contributions, why would you ever buy it? It would make infinitely more sense to deposit whatever you would have paid to insurance in a high yield savings account.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Read downthread for repeated explanations of how insurance works. You know you're in trouble when you profess shock that insurance has negative expected dollar value.
  - Calavar 3y ago
    On the contrary, I think using expected value to explain the value of insurance from the perspective of an insurance holder is a misunderstanding of insurance. People don't buy insurance to optimize the average case; they buy it to optimize the worst case. But an insurance policy that doesn't redistribute wealth has both negative expected value and negative value in the event of a payout. At which point it is just a personal rainy-day fund held in a savings account with a negative interest rate.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Insurance almost mathematically must be negative EV in dollar terms. It's positive EV in utility terms because of the declining marginal utility of a dollar. If it was dollarwise positive EV, every insurer would be insolvent. This is pretty basic? Like, it's an economics frequently asked question why buying an insurance policy isn't as irrational as playing the lottery, since both have negative dollar EV.
      - Calavar 3y ago
        You're moving away from the original question, which is does insurance redistribute wealth. If you get an insurance payout and that payout doesn't involve redistribution of wealth, then it means that the payout must come only from your premium payments, minus admin fees and profit margin. But that's not how insurance works. There are innumerable examples of people who received more in insurance payouts then they've ever paid in in premiums.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

> the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition I'm not that optimistic.

non-chalad 3y ago

The solution seems to be to remove the insurance mandate, and allow purchasing insurance across state lines. That way two locked-in markets are opened to more competition.

delecti 3y ago
Effectively removing the ability of states to regulate businesses in their own jurisdiction.
- datascienced 3y ago
  How is it different from someone outside CA buying Google ads?
  - delecti 3y ago
    It's so completely and utterly different that I'm not even sure what comparison you're making.
tptacek 3y ago
What insurance mandate?
- non-chalad 3y ago
  Any insurance mandate.

Kalium 3y ago

At the risk of being callous, the goal of home insurance is to assess and manage risk. Choosing ignorance in the interests of giving some people a subsidy on the assumption that they may be poorer does not further these goals in any way I can see. If the goal is redistribution, then using accurate risk data as a starting point seems preferable.

AdieuToLogic 3y ago
> At the risk of being callous, the goal of home insurance is to assess and manage risk. No, risk assessment and/or management is an internal operational concern. The goal of insurance providers, home or otherwise, is to charge fees such that the insurer collects as much revenue as possible while simultaneously expending as little as possible to remedy claims. Any justification legally available to an insurer supporting denying or reducing a claim will be employed.
- Too 3y ago
  If your insurers goal is revenue i suggest you go look for a new mutual insurance. (no, this is not some hippie collective thing, in many countries this is the norm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance)
  - PurestGuava 3y ago
    An insurance mutual's goal is still revenue. Your own link spells it out - it still tries to make a profit, it's just that whatever profit arises gets redistributed to policy holders or others. It still has to respond to commercial pressures and the need to run a sustainable business in the same way as any firm. It's a common misconception that co-operatives/mutuals somehow don't need to make money or will actively try to not make money, but in reality if they don't they tend to die fairly quickly.

jjav 3y ago

> the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition Nobody will see lower prices. Perhaps these perfect homes might see slightly smaller increases year to year. > houses in poor condition The point of the thread is that they're dropping people for random noise in satellite photos. The house might be perfect, it's just the photo that's wrong. But they don't care.