Insurance is a brilliant, beautiful idea. People come together to pool resources so that in the rare event that a catastrophe befalls someone, that unlucky person does not lose everything.
The idea of insurance went wrong when for-profit companies were allowed to get involved. Public insurance is cheaper and better. I’m not sure if it is still the case today, but until a few years ago public insurance in Saskatchewan cost a couple hundred bucks a year while people in other provinces were paying $1500 for the same coverage.
Here is an exhaustive list of things that were improved when it was made for-profit:
Can confirm, SGI still exists in Saskatchewan. It is definitely more than a couple hundred bucks a year but it is nice knowing that they don’t make a profit. They sent everyone a rebate a few years ago because they had a surplus
Wait to get hit?
I don’t think you’re doing it right.
Step 1 make sure you have gap insurance.
Step 2 never make more than the minimum car payment.
Step 3 when your ready for a new car, side swipe a car on the left and drive into a brick wall on the right. Make sure there are no cameras.
Step 4 enjoy your new car.
Step 5 commit identity fraud so you can keep a low insurance premium!
Step 6 do none of this because it’s all crimes. I really hope you read the instructions to the end before starting.
Hi, I followed your comment while reading it. I’m stuck after step 3, the police are asking lots of questions. Pls help.
New number
Who dis?
I really hope you read the instructions to the end before starting.
“Remove the diskette from its protective envelope” (it stayed in the box)
“Take the diskette by one of its corners” (“What corners, it’s round?”)
There is plenty to criticise about insurance companies, how did they stumble upon the one thing that is fine?
It’s not a scam, it’s just how companies work. By definition, every insurance will pay out less than they collected in payments. They have to pay their employees, their offices, taxes an yes, also their shareholders. That’s why, on average, insuring something is always a loosing bet.
You should only insure yourself against things that are potentially threatening your or your family’s existence: Liability, health, home, occupational disability, survivor benefits. For everything else it’s almost always better to just put the money into an account to have it at hand in case.
Insurance should always be public. If you feel the need to say things like “companies need to pay their shareholders,” you are only one braincell away from saying “gotta keep the lights on”.
Why should a travel cancellation insurance or a mobile phone insurance be public? You can take out an insurance for almost everything, from wedding insurances for when your spouse gets cold feed to alien abduction insurances. I don’t see why the state should be involved in that.
And of cause companies need to pay their shareholders. That’s how our economy works. Even if an insurance is state funded, it needs seed money, and that money costs interest. Either the state (i.e. you) pays the interest, or the insuree (i.e. you) pays the interest, but it has to be paid for either way.
Nobody’s talking about wedding insurance. The OP specified car insurance that you are legally required to have in many places in the US.
Nobody’s talking about wedding insurance.
I am. You know that topics can change or broaden during a conversation? I was explicitly talking about existential and non-existential insurances, and buttnugget responded with
Insurance should always be public.
which then would also include non-existentials. Also, car insurance in its broader sense is neither existential, nor is it legally required. What is required, is liability insurance for your car, because not having it and causing an accident could destroy the existences of you and your victim, by putting you into bankruptcy and your victim unable to realise their claims against a bankrupt person.
You can also insure your own car against all kinds of damages, from theft to engine failure, from collision to hailstorms. But that is not legally required, and usually it’s also not existential, unless your existence was threatened by loosing your car. Even the OP talks about non-existential car insurance, as they want their insurance to pay for their check engine light.
You know that topics can change or broaden during a conversation?
You don’t have to talk down to me or insult anyone else. I’m well aware of how basic conversations work, and the other person is trying to share their ideas.
What I mean is that you’re pigeonholing the conversation. You’re talking about perpetuating the system, as if insurance somehow needs to stay the way it is as a huge capitalist scam rather than reimagining it, especially when government systems are involved. And even then, I don’t see why insurance can’t be reformed or socialized for any of these purposes with the right framework. You’re coming at this by saying this is how it is and therefore this is how it should be.
But my bad, I forgot that in the US, even the wrong sneeze can send you into bankruptcy. It’s like Americans cling to this broken system to avoid being crushed by the weight of their own economy by pushing the problem somewhere else and turning it into monthly payments.
You can change the system all the way you want. But even a co-operative insurance in a communist society will have to spend money on other things beyond damage claims. Thus even they will take more money from the insuree, than they pay out.
Even if your insurance is only a pot where everyone throws their money in, and takes it back out when they need to, someone still had to buy the pot.
It doesn’t matter how you organise it, paying insurance premiums will – on average – always be a loss. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it’s just a fact. The important part of insurances is the “on average”: The vast majority of people will never cause a million dollar damage, so they can pay a tiny share of the damages caused by the one unlucky person who does.
Instead of being mad that you paid for the car insurance and never needed it, you should be happy that you didn’t end up in a car crash, destroying someones life. Instead of being sad that you paid for your health insurance for 90 years without ever needing it, you should be happy that you aren’t the one who had to spend years in hospitals fighting cancer. And instead of paying an insurance premium for your phone, you should put that money in a piggy bank and take it out if your phone ever gets stolen.
will have to spend money on other things beyond damage claims
Isn’t that what the government does with everything else? I don’t understand why this is a special case. They already take in a whole lot more taxes than they give out in services, and that’s fine. It’s understood that there’s an operational cost. But insurance, as it stands, is arguably little more than a mandated expense for the great majority of people.
Instead of being mad that you paid
I’m not mad that I pay for services. I’m upset that people are being denied claims, that not even a fraction of the money that had been paid for decades is available for other kinds of emergencies or basic needs because it’s a money sink where it all disappears under the pretext that you may need it some day under some specific circumstances as outlined in the fine print, that it’s mandatory to buy into this system, that it’s being touted as a necessity without giving a chance for alternative systems, and that the execs do everything in their power like raising premiums over bullshit solely for profit at the expense of people’s lives. There’s really no need to excuse this system as it is.
You should only insure yourself against things that are potentially threatening your or your family’s existence: Liability, health, home, occupational disability, survivor benefits.
That, and anything that’s legally required (such as auto insurance if you want to legally drive a vehicle)
The point of insurance is to protect your standard of living. If you can absorb the loss of something then you don’t need insurance for it(game controller for example). Most people can not absorb the sudden loss of a car(or house). So a company takes on the risk for you for a fee. That’s the general idea anyway.
This is a bunch of bullshit. Car insurance is a massive scam. Do you realize how many millions upon millions upon millions of dollars these companies take in and yet the minute you have to make a claim they fight tooth and nail for every single dollar to keep it in their pocket. It’s bullshit it was propagated by lobbyists. Fuck that scam.
Also you are required by law to have car insurance so they can do whatever the fuck they want.
We can tell exactly how much fucking money these companies make by the actors they put in their commercials and you know they’re not cheap. They’re not working for free. And the fact that how much money their CEOs and rest of the c staff are pocketing. Just like medical insurance. It’s a bunch of bullshit scam designed to line the pockets of others and push through by lobbyist and politicians that have benefited from monetary bribery.
I agree in that claims should not be a part of an insurance company due to the obvious conflict of interest. Without insurance though many families would be devastated into poverty or homelessness without it. It sucks but protects people from catastrophic loss. If it were run properly it would be cheaper but alas…greed.
With insurance many families are devastated into poverty as well.
Even if you can absorb it your still required by law to have it. So no it’s nothing like a game controller. Its nothing about protecting your standard of living.
It’s about protecting others standard of living from yourself. Insurance end of the day isn’t for you, it’s for others. So when you fuck up they arnt punished.
To some degree yes it is for yourself but that’s by far the least of its reasons for existing. To the point of it being more a happy accident then the intent.
Even if you can absorb it your still required by law to have it.
But the coverage you’re required to have isn’t for damages to YOUR car, it for you damaging MY car. YOU are required to have insurance so that when you total my car and cripple me for life, you’re able to pay that. That’s entirely different from a house.
That’s liability insurance and that is a requirement in order to share the road with others. The post is about their own insurance “I have to wait to get hit???” Which is the much more expensive insurance.
Well yeah, but that one is actually optional though.
You are not required to have it. If you own the car you do not have to have full coverage.
Most people don’t know that there is mandatory insurance for damage done to others, plus optional insurance for their own car. Clearly the person in the posted image is one of these people.
The main reason for car insurance is to make sure you can’t fuck someone else’s life up, that’s why it’s state mandated
You are taking about liability insurance. The post is about the insured’s car.
I’m currently having some suspect cardiac issues, but my insurance won’t pay for “preventative” treatment. I t seems I have to have, and survive, an actual heart attack, in order to be reimbursed for my treatment.
So, just like car insurance, where you can claim only after an accident.
It’s fucking stupid and makes no sense, because AFTER an incident is far more expensive…
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IDK what’s worse about that, that it’s called force majeure or that it translates to God hates you, so ain’t paying for that.
If Bob hates you and drops a branch on your car with a chain saw, then suuuuure you might get something, after your deductible of cause, but if you’ve pissed off God then…
Well because if you crash right after making the insurance there won’t be enough in your “savings”.
What if we do pay insurance and never get hit?
To me, both are not ideal. But somehow we as a society have accepted one as default and other as an extreme.
And the default one just happens to benefit the “shareholders” and not the everyday people.
(Btw the taxes we all pay could easily cover the costs of occasional accidents, and accidents could be reduced by proper regulations)
I mean thats the point, you are paying for reducing risk. If there is enough competition between insurers the average profit they make should be quite low.
Conceptually at least, if you never get hit, your premiums paid for the repairs of other people that did.
That’s the idea, no one knows if they will get in an auto accident. Most people cant absorb the cost of the ramifications. Instead of every person saving the full amount to replace their car, pay for hospital stays, make someone else whole (which is a ton of money out of the economy and you know for sure a lot of people wouldn’t be responsible enough to do that) we recognize that the number of people exposed to being in an accident is less than the number of people that will be in an accident.
Everyone pays into the pool, if someone has an accident they get to take more out than they put in by design.
That’s where your money goes if you never get in an accident. Insurance companies also make a profit by managing that pool of money, and they are incentivized to only insure good drivers or collect more money from bad drivers (which is why rates go up if you get in an accident)
The alternative is that everyone starts their own savings account, one that would almost definitely cost more money, and the number of people that would just not save anything is probably pretty high because they would know that they can’t realistically save up enough.
Some comercial insurance, workers compensation specially, have something called technical excesses sharing where the insurance company give back some money if the client company had less claims that the premium paid. But that only offered to really big accounts.
And this would only make the insurance that much more expensive to everyone.
They are in different pools, it should not. It’s done to reward companies with strong workers security
I don’t mind paying for auto insurance, but I also get more out than I pay :(
I probably pay in 5-6k before my car gets totaled and I get a payout higher than that before I start the process again.
Just once I want to be able to keep a car to the point where it’s actually paid off …
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Where do you live that you total a car every so often you don’t even pay them off
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What cars.? There’s no way somebody survives more than 2 totals, are you good?
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Do you still want to drive after all of this?
When your car is “totaled” (from the perspective of insurance) it just means that it would cost more to repair your car than your car is worth.
Mild hail damage can total a cheap/old car, even if you only need to replace the windshield for it to be drivable.
How cheap are we talking about???
You ever looked into how much it costs to replace all the body panels on a car? It could be several thousand bucks. If you’re running a 2000s car, even if it’s well maintained, repairs could easily cost more than the value of the car.
Recently happened to a friend of mine. Got some hail damage that was too big and widespread to hammer out nicely so the panels needed to be replaced. Old car, nothing wrong with it other than hail damage. Insurance said it was totaled. You can still drive it but it required a special title or something, I forget exactly what.
To point 2, do you know how easy it is to total a car? If you have any appreciable damage to the vehicle, it can be enough to total it. 2 of the crashes I’ve been in were parking lot speeds and it’s still enough to total it. Like, a light tap (<15mph) to the pillar separating the front and back doors is enough to total a car if it’s not worth a ton
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I love how you pay them thousands every year, and then when you want to use insurance, you have to pay them EVEN FUCKING MORE in excesses. Then, despite paying them thousands, they argue with you and try to not pay it. WHAT THE FUCK AM I EVEN PAYING FOR??
A lot of people can afford an insurance premium, and perhaps a deductible, but won’t have enough for a $40,000 liability even if they saved for years.
What is suggested in this post is not much different from the past where poor people simply went on not having coverage and ended up in indentured servitude working off debts with manual labor like picking rocks. It’s also just a thread away from Health Sharing Ministries, which is just a catastrophic failure whose nuance cannot be accurately depicted in a short comment.
And if you don’t pay you aren’t allowed to drive a car and participate in society…
Tangent: how shitty is it that owning/maintaining a car is a prerequisite to participate in society in some places.
It sucks ass I hate it
I can’t afford the work my car needs right now, and I have to do that work before I am allowed to renew my registration THAT I ALREADY PAY FOR.
So my functional car will be unregistered soon because I can’t afford the mechanic repairs. -_-
This is while I’m working 40hrs/week.
I understand why people go postal, this system hates us all and wants us to suffer/die.
the system doesn’t hate you. it just doesn’t care about you. it was made so car manufacturers can make a fuck ton of money
hi and would you like to talk about your car’s extended warranty?
I think where I live you can drive without insurance if you have $1m cash available earmarked for anything that happens.
This might be an urban myth though because I don’t know anyone that does that and haven’t actually looked it up.
There are comprehensive insurance policies where you can file a claim to get a repair done. It’s not cheap AND they’ll raise your rates, but you can get it :)
