It was always a terrible idea for the government to offer insurance when private insurers wouldn’t. It just forces everyone to subsidize the lifestyles of people who choose to live in disaster-prone areas. Perhaps it was necessary for a time to avoid major economic upheaval, but constantly rebuilding in areas where disasters keep happening should never have been allowed to become a long-term policy.
In the US, voters have shown over and over that they don’t care if a lot of people become homeless. Why would you expect them to care about people who become homeless because of fires than they do about people who become homeless because of economic conditions?
I think we’re likely to see a collapse of housing markets in places like CA and FL no matter what.
Note the glaring absence of you mentioning their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value.
A lot of insurance companies, including big ones like State Farm and Liberty Mutual, are owned by their policy holders. So yeah, I made the mistake of not mentioning their fiduciary duty to maximize value for their customers.
Do you grasp the notion that home owners can’t instantly pull up stakes and teleport to more insurable locations?
What do you expect insurance companies to do about it? Keep offering policies and collecting premiums while knowing they won’t be able to pay all the claims they get? That’s called fraud.
You say they’re “slinking off” as if they’ve stolen something, but what have they stolen? You say they’re leaving with their profits, but what profits are you referring to? Do you really think they’d be leaving if they were making money?
Yes, but you also have to believe the system produces satisfactory outcomes often enough for the whole thing to be worth it. It looks increasingly like a system that does little more than punish poor people for being poor and foreign people for being foreign. I would certainly be reevaluating my life choices if I were a criminal lawyer.
FFS, no. Do you even know what insurance is? They are always on the hook to make payouts for any policies that are active, and it happens regularly. Most of the money they take in goes toward paying claims. Most of the rest of the money goes toward overhead, which includes paying actuaries to evaluate how much risk they’re taking on and how much future payouts are going to cost. They determined that providing homeowners’ insurance in CA would soon cost them more in payouts than the state allows them to charge in premiums, so they decided to stop doing business in CA. Nobody was scammed. Their customers all got what they paid for while they were paying for it.
So many people here are speaking as if real estate insurance companies are doing something evil by pulling out of markets where it’s impossible for them to make a profit or even break even. The companies are not reneging on any obligations, just turning away customers they can’t afford to insure, and people here are responding by saying things like all insurance is a scam, and the insurance companies abusing their customers to enrich their shareholders.
I get the feeling they’re taking their opinions of the private health insurance market and applying them to insurance in general, and in doing so they’re demonstrating a lack of understanding of what insurance is for, why it’s required for certain purchases, and why people choose to do business with insurance companies even when they don’t have to
That’s not how it works at all. You’re thinking of health insurance. This thread is about insurers declining to renew contracts, not denying claims.
Good for you, but I like being invited to parties.
Guess what? I still use Reddit, too, because content on Lemmy is extremely scarce in comparison. Mastodon is likewise a fringe network. I’ve barely even heard the name Friendica so I can be certain there are approximately zero people I know there. Shopping local is great when local businesses actually put their prices and inventory online, but they rarely do.
For Xitter, BlueSky is drop-in replacement that’s superior in most respects. I’m not aware of any equivants for Facebook or Amazon.
Man, this thread is reminding me that Lemmy is even worse than Reddit when it comes to being populated by people who have strong opinions about things they don’t understand at all.
Tell them what? Banks should not be offering mortgages on homes that are at to much risk to be insured. People simply should not be living in areas where wildfires are a near certainty.
What you propose is illegal in California. It seems like a mildly counterproductive law, but I can’t imagine it would make much difference if they were allowed to offer policies nobody can afford anyway.
This is a really dumb take. Pulling out of a market where it’s impossible to even break even is not greedy or corrupt.
I agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that restricting what people can do in their own homes has been deemed constitutional under the interstate commerce clause art least since Wickard v. Filburn.
I don’t think the government has the right to control what you do in your private time on your private device.
[Laughs in War in Drugs.]
The 19th is the legal deadline.
Surely they can convicted, right?
Right?
That’s literally what’s happening at the state level in California. And the insurers got out because they can’t cover their operating expenses while charging what the state considers a reasonable cost.