Perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
Speaking of the Palisades fire, I’m not sure if anyone has looked into this yet, but they probably should:
It’s true. I read it on the internet.
Fact-check that, Sugar-Mountain!
Insurance companies are scummy but the headline phrasing makes it seem like they JUST canceled the policies…but no, it was 6 months ago.
As much as I want to hate them for it, can you really blame them? Insurance operates under the measured assumption that most people won’t have to use it for some major. When wildfires become probable, it’s almost guaranteed to cost them exponentially more than homeowners paid in premiums.
Even if insurance cost $50,000/year, it would take several years of payments to cover the payout. And California has wildfires yearly.
This is why insurance shouldn’t be for profit.
I think you might have missed the point.
I mean it would be great to have some kind of socialised home insurance that wasn’t “for profit”, but such a scheme should still refuse to insure homes which are likely to burn down.
That probably sounds good in your head. But you are only thinking of fires. What if they just pick the highest risk factor for every house and refuse to cover that. Then what would be the point of the insurance. And if you consider all the houses that are a high risk for something… fire, hurricane, flooding, high winds, tornadoes, earthquakes… you aren’t left with many houses.
What a silly thing to say.
Obviously, if one insurer refused to cover what ever thing, they would lose all their customers to other insurers who covered sensible risks.
The point is, you can’t insure against risks that are too likely to occur.
Let me rephrase. If they refused to insure any house that was a high risk for one factor. That would be a very sizable chunk of the country. Even if they only refused to insure it for the thing it was high risk for, it would make unsurance on the house pointless. Flood zones and wildfire zones particularly are expending every year. Hurricane zones used to be ok to insure because hurricanes didn’t hit too hard too often. But they are stronger and more frequent, so much of Florida has a very short list of insurers which will trend to zero in the near future. While I agree everyone should move out of florida because of the shitty politics, that isn’t really practical.
The cost of insurance needs to equal the risk though.
If a house is going to get burned down every year, who pays to re-build it?
It isn’t practical to expect everyone to move out of florida, but climate change is impractical.
Thats why i pointed at building codes. Require building that will survive the threat. Then people will have to pay more for them which discourages people from building in those areas at least.
When your insurance drops your coverage, that’s your cue to GET THE FUCK OUT BEFORE YOU HAVE YET LOST EVERYTHING.
Those actuarial tables are designed from the ground up and refined over literally decades (up to around a century in some cases) to predict risk and while they’re not always perfectly accurate they are clearly ENOUGH so that they have made it possible for insurers to remain profitable.
IF THEY KNOW ANYTHING THAT YOU DON’T, THEY ARE DEFINITELY ACTING ON IT.
I know you can’t literally just drop everything, or fit absolutely everything that matters to you in your car in a pinch, but you WILL be better off if you’ve packed up and prepped for transport as many as possible of the things that would hurt you and/or inconvenience you the most to leave behind.
So for those of you who haven’t already experienced total loss, learn from this. Prepare yourselves. The people displaced by this will strain many other extant failure points in our society. Shit is about to get MUCH, MUCH WORSE.
The warning bell rang decades ago and we’re still ignoring it. There is no escaping or planning around what is to come. It doesn’t matter if you move somewhere less impacted by climate change. Those places can’t support anywhere close to the amount of people that will need to live there. We’ll ruin those places fighting over what scraps remain until there’s nowhere left to go.
The entire world basically just tried to ignore COVID and kept burying the bodies hoping everyone would stop caring. (BTW, excess death statistics are still horrifically higher than pre-2019 levels across the world)
Long COVID is a literal debilitating lifelong mental and physical disability but everyone has it now so we just don’t care.
It’s simple. The bourgeois must be eliminated or humanity dies.
wow, its almost as if we should cut off the heads of insurance CEOs and nationalize them all into one low cost government plan thats paid for with pennies on the dollar in taxes.
lol, who am I kidding. Idiot Americans will always prefer paying 3000 dollars for bad coverage, rather than pay 100 in taxes for great coverage.
Or, you know, tackle climate change. But both are equally unlikely.
You’d think that insurance companies would be on the forefront of pushing climate change mitigation and prevention specifically because the impacts of worsening climate change will have a massive impact on their bottom line.
Maybe they can counter some of the petro company propaganda with their own marketing.
Why would they do that rather than just not offering plans in areas where they project they will lose money?
They’ll run out of places to sell insurance pretty fast if climate change isn’t effectively countered.
And that’s when you’ll start seeing the property insurance industry suddenly really give a shit about climate change.
I’m sorry, are we just skipping over the regulations that caused these companies to pull out? Most of these homes would still be covered. They’d be paying a higher price, but they’d be covered.
When you put a legal cap on costs, the company will pull out.
Yea that’s just basic economics.
Maybe we should have rules in place that provide more protection for actual human beings instead of prioritizing profit margins or pretending that “Basic Economics” is a universal law rather than a guideline of how people interact with each other. Sorry, I’m not mad at you, just the system we live in
We, did, they were pushed to the side. Those rules and protections were building more reservoirs, keeping those and the current ones full of water, continuous upkeep on fire hydrants, rehiring firefighters who were fired for not taking the vax, regular controlled burns, clearing out the undergrowth, not dumping water into the ocean after rainfall… So, so many that were completely abandoned.
You seem to think the prices for fire protection came out of nowhere, but they don’t. As these precautions were abandoned one by one, fire insurance went up, because the likelihood of a fire grew exponentially. When government put a cap on price, that effectively made it clear that the company would go bankrupt, completely, because they knew a fire was going to happen eventually.
We should be mad that those very protections put in place to help people were taken away by the government, not the companies.
Por que no los dos? The government is NOT faultless in this, but how often are those regulations removed because a company lobbyist
bribed themhinted very strongly that they would like that?
Man insurance is such a scam. They’ll only actually offer hypothetical coverage if they know you won’t need it 😅
Actually need it? “Well, we have to make a profit! Why would we pay for that thing you’re paying us to cover?”
Yeah it is. I made a claim for hail damage then It made me uninsurable/insane premiums when I moved for 5 year, no fault thing from mother nature but ya know it’s my fault they had to pay out. I was told if I made 3 or more claims in 5 years I be uninsurable, hoping my home stays safe from this fire that’s 2miles away from me…
The thing is if you buy a home and in California it’s likely 1mm plus in the la region. You’re paying huge mortgage rate more so with insurance and the recent rates basically house poor. If you loose your house you still have to pay the bank so you can’t afford to live anywhere right? So with out insurance buying a home is one step away from being destitute?
It’s needs to be a state sponsored thing and nonprofit. Like fire departments if everyone loses their home who’s left to taxes, or even stay there.
I live 1 mile from the no insurance zone and in Los Angeles it took me weeks to find anyone to even cover our home after being dropped because “we have a flat roof” we don’t, it’s bs excuse.
Seems to me non privilege stuff should be a government run thing. Everyone should have a right to health care and housing and food. None of this shit should be for profit, fuck insurance.
Sorry realized I went on a rant.
I’m in a safe-ish area and was told 2 claims in 3 years and they wouldn’t renew my insurance. Been here over 20 years and had one claim 10 years ago.
Had lightning hit and called the insurance directly, they opened a claim number but we ended up not using it. Meaning they paid $0 because it turned out to be a simple fix, it was just scary in the moment at 3am with water gushing out (not into the house). So we just paid the $300 to fix it and they closed the claim.
Two years after that we called when a tree hit the house, went a different route and called the independent agent first, not the insurance company directly and that’s when we learned if we started a claim for the tree damage, they probably wouldn’t renew. Ended up being almost $3000 out of pocket so we can keep the house insured and the mortgage company happy.
Yeah that’s the worst, even if you just call them to ask if something is covered they will still make a note and use it against you.
