Let’s not forget when you get hit not everything is covered, also some damages like trees falling in your car from storms etc. Is also not always covered unless you have specific and even more expensive insurance. Also you don’t even cover your own car, you cover the other persons car.
In conclusion: insurance is a fucking scam
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…
hi and would you like to talk about your car’s extended warranty?
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?”)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?
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 mandatory cost 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 being denied claims, that not even a fraction of the money paid in for decades is available for other kinds of emergencies or basic needs because it’s a money sink where it all disappears under the nebulous excuse that you may need it some day under some specific circumstances, that it’s mandatory to buy into this system, that it’s being touted as a necessity without giving a chance to alternative systems, and that the execs do everything in their power like raising premiums over BS solely for profit at the expense of people’s well-being. There’s really no need to excuse this system.
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 idea is that what you pay goes to a fund that is used when the insurer has to pay a client, therefore socialising the costs of fixing whatever the clients insured.
If every client could get their money back, the company would likely have less money available for the payouts (and would risk everyone taking their money out once a big payout is due), and might go bankrupt if too many payouts come up at once.
So instead the idea is that ideally you end up paying less than you’d get if you needed to fix whatever you’re insured for… but it’s like a bet: you bet that shit’ll happen before you’ve paid more, the insurer bets that it won’t.
Of course, though, like in all businesses based on gambling the house always wins.
Even if they weren’t scamming you, they’ve got actuarial tables telling them how much you have to pay to make sure they’ll have a certain amount of profit… but of course they are scamming you, and they’ll do everything possible to avoid paying you even in the unlikely event that you fall on the wrong side of the actuarial table.
Actuarial tables are only used on life (life, retirement, workers compensation, health insurance) on top of them you need guaranteed interest rate and that give the risk price, but can be mathematically prove that charging only the risk price the insurance company eventually is going to fail, so an actuarial rate is added to avoid that. On top of that, another rate is added for administrative costs and “cost of capital” AKA profit for the shareholders. Finally, comercial costs are added and that’s the price you pay.
For casualty (no life) the risk price is probability of event × cost of event, the rest is the same.
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 …
-
Where do you live that you total a car every so often you don’t even pay them off
-
What cars.? There’s no way somebody survives more than 2 totals, are you good?
-
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.
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
-
How about the fact that home insurance doesn’t cover preventative care. We had a branch fall on our roof and the insurance had to pay out to get that part of the roof fixed. I pointed out that there’s another dead branch up there that I’m a little concerned about hitting the roof, and maybe they would prefer to pay a few hundred to get a guy up there to remove the branch than a few thousand to get the roof repaired the next time, and the insurance company said absolutely not.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Insurance is about compensation for loss, and that’s it. It’s not their job to keep your house safe, that’s still on you. It’s their job to give you money if something happens beyond your control. Now that you mentioned that other branch, you should probably take care of it, if it falls they could deny your claim since you were negligent in preventing a known risk.
Insurance is about compensation for loss, and that’s it.
That’s certainly not true of medical insurance. Preventative care is part of the whole package. In fact, certain preventative care is encouraged. Health insurance companies are more than happy to pay for UTIs, for instance, because they’re so much cheaper than pregnancies.
Medical has been warped into a Frankenstein product that is partially insurance, discount club, and prepayment system.
Did you mean IUDs? Can’t get preggo from a UTI…
Did you mean IUDs?
… yes.
Although UTIs can sterilize you.
That’s only in countries with sane health insurance. In America quarter profit seeking insurance, preventive care is a short term loss and therefore not paid, even when they affect long term profits.
Insurance provider in my area has premium discounts if I do certain things. If I get my boilers checked and serviced, it reduces my premium next year. And cases as dead branch falling, they have a form that I can fill up to send for review, however in reality they will wait for the annual home inspection before renewal to asses threat, but they would pay for dead branch to be removed.
A bloke down my street had a tree growing too close to electrical wire and he kept complaining to the electric company to trim the tree or risk a fire to no avail. Then he told this to the insurance and they sent a strongly worded letter prompting electrical company to fix it in 2 days.
Also I have some experience with flood risk underwriting in Malaysia, we’d pay to have Strom drains cleaned, and fix some supports for buildings who we’d deem flood prone, because fixing those would be a 1-2% cost of replacing the entire house.
Point being insurance providers definitely can and do spend money on preventative care. I guess US very strongly doesn’t believe in that.
Theoretically speaking. They should’ve just raised your rates. Since your house is at higher risk than they thought. But should offer a rate decrease if you maintain your surrounding trees.
Unless that information doesn’t change how risky they think your house is, therefore theoretically “correct” thing to do is what they did, nothing.
They are insurance companies. They basically bet that you’ll be lucky. They don’t want to lower the risk. Paying insurance companies is what you do when you want to lower the risk, and that would cut into their margins.
And yes, there are insurance companies for insurance companies.
They’ll make those thousands back when they raise your rates.
A lot of people can afford an insurance premium, and perhaps a deductible, but won’t have enough for a $40,000 liability even if they saved for years.
What is suggested in this post is not much different from the past where poor people simply went on not having coverage and ended up in indentured servitude working off debts with manual labor like picking rocks. It’s also just a thread away from Health Sharing Ministries, which is just a catastrophic failure whose nuance cannot be accurately depicted in a short comment.
The difference is that (in theory at least), insurance will pay your full costs, regardless of how much you’ve already paid in. You can sign an auto insurance on one day, pay in 100$, then get into a 20k$ crash the next, and get the entire costs covered.
A retirement savings fund is capped by how much money you’ve put in it. You can never take out more money than you’ve put in (+interest/portfolio growth).
That’s kinda the whole point of insurance. If you want an insurance model like described in the post, well nothing is stopping you from opening an ETF or other savings fund, and dedicating it to auto payments. It’s not like you need a dedicated industry/service for that.
Exactly. Insurance is best thought of as similar to gambling, but functionally the opposite. It’s “I’m giving you $x per month knowing that I’m probably going to lose money on this exchange, but in return if I’m hit with y disaster that it would be very difficult to financially recover from then you pay for it”.
I get that some people are frustrated by it during financial squeezes, and with liability insurance it can be annoying as it’s mandatory. But as someone who’s gotten a renter’s insurance payout, the relief of “thank fuck I’m not out thousands of dollars while having to deal with this disaster” is immense
That’s exactly how it started! People would go to a major bookmaker like Lloyd’s coffee shop and place a bet against themselves. So you would bet that your ship would sink or your house would burn down or that you would suffer a crop failure. Then if the bad thing happened you would win the bet.
Of course, if the odds are close the bet would be very expensive, so you’d have to do monthly financing. But what if the catastrophic event happens before the bet is fully paid?
Somebody had the genius idea to pool everybody’s bet and run the odds.
I can’t fault people for being confused or frustrated when we also have insurance that’s intended to work as the primary means of payment.
Having our crap tastic excuse for a medical payment system be based in insurance, and then having another mandatory insurance system that’s somehow less helpful is reasonably frustrating.
That’s fair, and yeah I’m all in for replacing the health insurance system with single payer, but I find it difficult to picture a better system for car based risks without removing cars from the equation. The alternatives involve pushing some of the financial costs of driving onto people who create less of these costs. It’s why bad drivers have to get more expensive insurance and may struggle to get insured by the medium or low cost insurers.
Additionally home insurance is rapidly becoming more frustrating to people in many places thanks to climate change. The actuarial tables don’t lie, and seeing as destructive weather events are making many places more prone to disaster, insurers are going to find themselves taking the emotional blame, especially when many people refuse to believe that the climate has changed.
Not necessarily saying our system is wrong, just that the systems being so different can make people confused. :)
The alternatives involve pushing some of the financial costs of driving onto people who create less of these costs
I mean, our current model does that. All insurance does. You pool costs with the expectation that most people won’t need as much as they put in.
A significant amount of our costs are based on statistical, not individual, risks. A 23 year old male is going to be charged more for car insurance regardless of their driving record.A better system might just be universal car insurance via vehicle registration. Bigger pool, easier to accommodate people who can’t afford adequate coverage, and it better ensures everyone’s cost is covered.
It’s also nice to not have a law forcing people to buy a product from a private company.
I think of insurance as a cost limitation device. In case of disaster it limits the potential costs to something manageable in exchange for a manageable monthly payment. As you acquire more expensive things (house, car, etc.) those potential costs expand significantly. With vehicles your car insurance also covers some medical expenses after an accident, as well as covering any other partie’s vehicles and medical costs should that be the direction the claim goes
I can pay a couple thousand dollars a year to insure my house but I definitely couldn’t have paid the 40k out of pocket to replace my roof, siding, a couple of doors and windows and repaint the garage after a recent hail storm. Every vehicle I’ve lost to nature’s chaos had a loan tied to it which would’ve been very difficult to both continue to pay back and repair/replace the vehicles. Insurance limited those costs
That’s a good model to think of it. Insurance originated as mutual aid and I’m very in support of not for profit insurance as a concept. Like, what you’re actually paying is the price of catastrophe times the odds of it in the given time plus administrative and profit costs. What that all means is that if you can’t afford it, then you really can’t afford to not have it should you need it.
You still have to pay for insurance even with the fund though. It’s required by law.
It probably varies based on states but in CA you can put a deposit in with the DMV in lieu of getting insurance. The deposit would be used for any damages you are liable for. I don’t remember the amount but it made insurance seem like a better deal to me personally since the coverages went way beyond the deposit amount.
The requirement is “proof of financial responsibility” not “insurance” specifically. Every state allows you to establish a surety bond rather than insurance. If you’ve got $30k-$50k lying around doing nothing, you can let the state hold on to. So long as you don’t get sued for damages related to your driving, you get it back when you stop driving.
I mean outside of the fact by law you have to have car insurance.
Depends. You can also deposit so much to the DMV instead for them to hold in place of insurance. In California it’s $75k.
Ah yes, $75,000, a totally reasonable amount for the average joe to just give away.
75k is a pittance compared to the damage you could do to another person’s property or life while driving. That’s the whole point of the legally mandated liability insurance–for most people getting in an accident that results in injury to the other party would be financially devastating. And even worse would be having someone hit you and put you through 250k of medical care with no ability to pay.
Thousands of people are injured every day in car accidents in the US and about 100 are killed, so its not some kind of unicorn situation.
If you want to argue about driving being a necessity to live and work, that’s a completely separate discussion from why liability insurance is necessary.
It’s not a completely separate discussion though. If driving is necessary to live and work, and you legally have to have insurance to drive, then I believe that to be a completely reasonable connection. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a system in place to ensure people’s lives don’t get destroyed without proper compensation, I’m simply saying our current system is broken, and to try to justify it with saying you can spend what amounts to more than what the average person annually makes in the US is ridiculous.
Well that’s the thing. It’s about ensuring that there’s a legally predefined amount of money available to pay for damages you cause while driving. It’s not going to be cheap. The dmv holding it as cash is merely the alternative to insurance pooling everyone together, charging them according to risk and the cost of doing business, then paying it out whenever necessary.
The only real alternative would be forcing you to actively maintain that amount in free credit, which would probably be difficult and have a fee associated with the risk of inability to pay, especially as you’re not guaranteed to survive a crash you’re at fault in.
That’s why people get liability insurance instead,
The average new car is 50k, many cars are a lot more and medical expenses can be crazy. If you accidentally total a 100k sedan and the driver ends up with a broken bone you could be forced essentially into a life of indentured servitude with 50% of your wages garnished for life
If you can’t afford to give away 75k, then you can’t afford to not have auto insurance, so that’s kinda a mute point.
Just in case it’s not just a spelling error
It’s actually moot point not mute point
What a shit take, “oh you can’t afford 75000 dollars, so that means you should instead also spend thousands of dollars every year for the rest of your life, and hey you are legally required to do so!”
I’d have fewer complains if driving weren’t a necessity to survive in this country, public transportation is few and far between if it even exists locally, and good luck getting any decent job without a car, or I guess you get minimum wage at the local gas station barely even being able to pay for rent. Oh, want to move? Guess what you’d need for that!
It’s a rigged system, and I despise seeing someone try to justify any part of it because “oh you could just pay $75000” ??? Fucking ridiculous.
Insurance is to cover the costs of the OTHER person if you cause an accident, so fucking yeah.
If you get in a car, that has the potential to cost someone else tens of thousands of dollars if you fuck up, you better fucking have some way in place to compensate that person, in case you do fuck up.
It’s your choice if you use insurance or capital for that, but it’s unfair to OTHER people on the road if they have to end up sitting up on (tens of) thosuands of dollars because you fucked up, and don’t have any way to compensate them.
And getting rid of insurance is not the solution to bad public transit access, and mandatory auto liability insurance isn’t a bad thing just because shit public transit forces most people into cars.
Like what alternative do you suggest ? No mandatory insurance, and crash victims just have to send up sitting on their own repair and medical costs, and that’s somehow better ?
I feel like ending up sitting on the costs of a crash you didn’t even cause is going to be more harmful to low income people than having to fork over liability insurance payments.
My suggestion is a government based insurance system that everyone puts a proportional amount into based on their wages, almost like taxes one might say, that goes towards a publicly available fund for people that have traumatic accidents/injuries.
The insurance you’re required by law to carry is liability imsurance that ensures you don’t ruin someone’s entire life with no ability to compensate them. If you own your car free and clear, its completely on you whether you want to insure your own property.
The difference is that (in theory at least), insurance will pay your full costs, regardless of how much you’ve already paid in. You can sign an auto insurance on one day, pay in 100$, then get into a 20k$ crash the next, and get the entire costs covered.
I’ve had basically this. In the decade or so I’ve been paying for my own insurance, I’ve had about 75k paid out in claims (hail storm totaled 2 cars and did heavy damage to the house, plus a third car totalled by a deer on a blind corner on a county highway)
Climate change is absolutely turning the entire insurance industry on its head given places like the southeast with frequent hurricanes and the southwest with frequent wildfires. And for everyone else the increasingly severe storms are raising the chances of a random incidence of chaos leading to a claim
Things like insurance, home and auto need to government run and not for profit
insurance, home and auto
And the biggest one: health
True, sorry, I’m fortunate enough to live in a single payer Healthcare country. Although it desperately needs reform, vision and dental aren’t really covered
can’t look at bad teeth if you don’t have any eyes!
Annnnnd if you can’t eat, you’ll die so you don’t need to see anything anyway!
I thought were were against US health policy?
Haven’t you heard? For-profit healthcare is coming to a fascist near you!
deleted by creator
Single payer insurance of any type pulls from a far larger pool than any company could have, lowering the individual cost and allowing a bigger risk coverage. But… what about all those insurance companies (of all types), as well as other industries that rely on the increased costs? How will they survive? /s
Ahhh I’m sorry! I forgot about the poor shareholders! Forgive me!
I’m beginning to think you don’t love the GDP, citizen
GDP me harder daddy
I work in auto insurance and 100% agree. Shocks my coworkers when don’t think auto insurance shouldn’t be all about profit.
Home insurance should absolutely NOT be government wrong. That’s just government sponsored building in flood zones at that point
I mean they can stop allowing building in flood zones. Home insurance should not be for profit
The biggest thing with auto insurance isn’t covering your car, it’s covering the cost of whatever you hit sueing you.
Your car may only be worth $3,000, but if you hit a pedestrian and they require a dozen surgeries and are wheelchair bound for life, you bet you’re ass you’re getting sued for a few million in medical costs.
In a reasonable country, those medical costs would be free, but since they’re not you need some sort of protection against once accident bankrupting you in civil suits.
In a reasonable country, public insurance would charge your auto insurance to recover costs. The harms and risks of car ownership don’t need further subsidies
In reasonable countries they do exactly that. The health insurance ensures that your victim gets the required treatment. But they also ensure, that in the end the damages you caused aren’t paid for by the public.
Why is car insurance so expensive in all the other countries then?
In addition to what everyone else said, property damage is a big part of it as well.
Let’s say you run into a building and knock out a load bearing wall. Or plough through a business or government office. It’s not impossible to rack up a couple million in damages if you crash bad enough.
Real answer: in most other countries you can be punitively sued, ex: if a person wants to recoup the emotional damages from being crippled. You can also, depending on the country, be made to cover the cost of services provided by the medical system if you were found to be at fault (I don’t know how often that happens for an individual vs. a large company, but that’s how the rates were explained to me by a UK colleague)
Plus there are things not covered by healthcare, and loss of income etc
Even in countries with universal health care surgeries aren’t typically free. They are just paid by a public health insurance. That health insurance will pay at first but it will try to get it’s money back from you if you injured somebody.
Repair costs for two vehicles outside the US is probably just as expensive as a doctor’s visit for a single person inside the US.
##ItsAScam
Third party liability for my policy is a few million last time I checked, if you somehow cause a heavy truck to crash or damage a piece of infrastructure you can run into those figures pretty fast.
I never really thought about that before. That’s probably why america hasn’t had healthcare for all, the insurance companies are lobbying (bribing) the shit out of the republicans.
Health insurance companies are lobbying the shit out of both parties. Car insurance companies would love universal healthcare. It would drop their outlays which would increase their profits.
Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong, that would make sense.
I have no insider knowledge, that’s just my bullshit take.
I DETEST both-sides-ism, but yeah actually in this case, both sides are being bribed and blocking true progress, just the paid off Democrats have been doing it more quietly by slow playing and avoiding real single payer solutions when the party actually has power.
When was the last time they had enough power to pass anything like that? It would take a 2/3 majority.
I love the idea is the only thing justifying one racket is another racket
It’s in you’re contract how much they’ll pay out for this. $50-$100k is common. After that it’s on you. But you’re right in the sense that law suits often happen to seek this amount.
Even in a country with „free“ healthcare, if you are at fault for the accident, your car insurance will have to reimburse the other parties health insurance for their medical costs.
All insurance companies and lotteries take in huge amounts of cash and pay relatively little back. The whole economy is a scam if everyone needs “insurance”.
