this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
110 points (98.2% liked)

News

23622 readers
3255 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 27 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If my house was destroyed due to climate disaster and all my livelihood and possessions were gone, and the insurance I was paying had the audacity to tell me they removed my insurance I would luigi their entire board of executives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

And wouldn't stop there....

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don’t wish misfortune on any person but, this is a good thing. Yes, there is a housing crisis, but part of that crisis is where and what we are constructing. If we are utilizing resources (whether it’s capital, labor, or materials) to reconstruct buildings every 3-10 years then those resources cannot be use to construct more sustainable housing.

Part of the problem is the way the flood insurance subsidization program works. Don’t get me wrong. Insurance needs to be affordable, but the program needs to adjusted so that when a claim is made in the highest risk areas, the payout is sufficient to relocate the insuree to less risky property, and the claimed property could be transferred to the department of the interior or other entity responsible for converting the land to a flood mitigation zone. (Likely reverting it back to the wetlands that were drained to build in the first place).

I wouldn’t even know where to start with fire risk zones…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

For fire risk the premiums should be sufficient to allow insurance companies to do the mitigation work like vegetation clearing and controlled burns. Or pay into a fund that has state wildlands fire departments like cal fire do the work since they're also the ones that fight the fires. It can also turn into a employment boom for young able bodied folks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

That’s alright. Megacorp(tm), who incidentally also owns an insurance company, will buy it and gladly rent it to you.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Oh look, the hard unavoidable consequences of "it's just a few degrees"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

“They may cuss us out,” Mr. Taylor said. “But they never stop building.”

One of the problem is new properties should not be allowed to be built in such areas. Others should be kind of grand-fathered, but I understand if insurers are being bankrupted, there is a problem somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

It is almost like we already have a home ownership crisis or or something. NYT in the clouds once again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Clouds maybe, but they’re the ones talking about it, not many others.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What's going on here is that Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic Senator, held a hearing which made data about insurance drops and rate increases public. That's creating a news cycle about it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

Hopefully it results in more Luigis.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

Insurance is a scam. Fuck them. I pay each fucking paycheck and they don't want to pay. What if everyone dropped their insurance and then paid out of pocket. As long as you are paying something, they can not collect, and hospitals can't turn you away.

This is literally what America is fine with health insurance CEOs being denied further life coverage.

Edit: The article is about health insurance, but it doesn't matter. The goal of insurance is to take your money, use your money to invest, and then try not to pay you anything. Yes, people have had insurance cover some things in an emergency, but they should be doing more.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Ultimately, insurance is a bucket of money we all pay into to help the few who go through an emergency

Obviously you need administration to handle the bureaucracy and make sure no one is stealing from the emergency pot fraudulently

That being said, what I take exception to is the profit. Why, the ever loving fuck, is it ok to take more than your costs for this? Why is money intended for the public good funneled up to the ownership class?

Pay your people, pay out the coverage. The rest of the money has no business leaving the pot... Not to run ads, or to lobby lawmakers. Definitely not to end up in an unrelated person's pocket.

It's a case for a government run entity if I've ever seen one

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Guy in the article, Richard D. Zimmel, has a 725K property, add maybe 300K of what's inside and you reach a million $. Not everyone has that in his pocket account :-/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

And there's another part of the problem: artificially inflated house and property prices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Silver-City,-NM_rb/

There are a lot of houses in Silver City, New Mexico that are a lot cheaper than the one owned by the guy in the article. My guess is that his is probably pretty ritzy for the area.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

You probably can't pay out of pocket to replace your house if it burns down.

This article is about homeowners insurance, not health insurance

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

ALL insurance is a scam. They are ALL the same. Insurance companies do nothing but pay less than what has been given. That's how they make money.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Sure, in aggregate, across all homeowners, they pay out less then they take in. But that doesn't make it a scam. They can pay out more for a specific homeowner than they take in.

On average, you will be worse off if you buy insurance than if you don't. The odds are against the buyer with insurance.

However, if you have a utility function that isn't linear in the amount of money you have, it can be advantageous to get insurance. Say you don't care that much about having the small amount of extra money you'd have if you avoided insurance, but you care very, very much about losing the value of your house at one go. Insurance will mitigate that risk.

If you have enough reasonably-liquid assets that you can afford to just replace your house with cash, you might want to not get insurance. But even in that case, you'd need to hold assets in a liquid form, which places constraints on those assets. Let's say that the average number of houses that burns down in a state per year is 100. You could have every homeowner ensure that they have enough liquid assets to replace their house. But it'd be cheaper to have an insurer hold, say, 500 times the cost of a house in liquid assets. They couldn't cover the situation where all the houses burn down, and this is why insurers typically don't offer coverage for correlated risk scenarios, where all houses might be impacted, as in war. But for things like fires, it'd be extraordinarily unlikely for more than five times the normal amount to burn down, so having an insurer involved relaxes constraints on how assets are held and how much need to be held.

NPR Planet Money did a bit on correlated risk in homeowner's insurance a while back.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/349650496

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Exactly. Insurance handles low-probability high-impact uncorrelated disasters really nicely, and is worth paying for to protect against those.

Correlated disasters require public policy and shared infrastructure to lower their risk and the extent to which people are exposed to them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Meh, most insurance does what it says on the tin, just read your policies carefully before you sign. Car insurance has absolutely saved my financial ass twice and life insurance has protected numerous families financially after the death of a loved one

Health insurance is a bunch of bullshit though because it shouldn't exist at all and the words Healthcare industry should have never been brought together.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That's what I mean. We pay so much in taxes that everything should be taken care of for us. We have been deceived into thinking that we can't possibly pay for all of this. Money is nothing to the US government.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Don't know why they think their anecdotal experience means homeowners insurance isn't a scam. Ask those homeowners in Staten island after hurricane sandy how great their insurance was

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Comparing "routine" claims, like your house burning down to random chance, to a disaster zone affecting hundreds of homes all at the same time is comparing apples to oranges.

Realistically, it should be the government taking care of claims in this situation for freak disasters and covering for people to relocate if the area is deteriorating and expected to have more and more disasters due to things like climate change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well, insurance itself isn’t a scam. There are just a lot of shitty insurance companies who have found a way to profit by not actually following through. Conceptually, it makes sense. But it shouldn’t be a profit driven business.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Conceptually, it makes sense. But it shouldn’t be a profit driven business.

You're not required to use a profit driven insurance company (for things like home, life). You can choose to use Mutual Insurance company.

What are mutual insurance companies?

"An insurance company owned by its policyholders is a mutual insurance company. A mutual insurance company provides insurance coverage to its members and policyholders at or near cost. Any profits from premiums and investments are distributed to its members via dividends or a reduction in premiums."

Some of the big name companies are mutual insurance companies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Might be true but if it was collectivized and not for profit, perhaps home ownership insurance would be worthwhile. It might have also exerted some regulation over the cancerous development of the suburbs, especially in places where growth and development was known to be a systemic problem decades ago. Like Florida, Arizona, Nevada, etc.