- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
More insurance companies are fleeing the state because of the growing threat from natural disasters.
More insurance companies are fleeing the state because of the growing threat from natural disasters.
Insurance doesn’t work very well for things like hurricanes. When big events happen that cause large percentages of their policy holders to file claims at the same time, it results in large payouts which causes increases in price. When prices go up, people don’t insure. This combined with the fact that florida gets hurricanes means prices for insurance are high.
Maybe the state could help by introducing laws to help combat insurance fraud, but that could lead to consumers getting fucked by their insurance companies.
You are being downvoted unfairly. There is greed at play, but there is math and economics as well.
The state could also help by reviewing building codes and infrastructure to make the losses due to hurricanes less severe but, with Florida republican votes not understanding the benefits of government helping address externalities for the benefit of everyone, there’s no chance the situation will improve there…
Most insurance companies strive to avoid excessive profits, honestly and aim for a combined ratio of something less than 5% profit. It’s a fairly competitive field, getting greedy results in losing policies and is very price reactive. Consumers can change pretty easily and do so regularly.
Insurance can work just fine for things like hurricanes. Insurance companies have several methods to address it. They’re all effectively variations of buying insurance policies themselves.
Re-insurance pools are a close analog. It’s basically a bunch of insurance companies from around the planet getting together and agreeing to pool risks. Big companies also use a bunch of funky financial instruments to simulate insurance.
There’s some risk of increased systemic correlation (eg climate change may increase the risk that major hurricanes hit multiple areas around the planet simultaneously). That’s largely mitigated in that we can see it coming. Climate change is pretty prominent in their models and they can adjust premiums or stop offering policies, over time.
The bigger risk is in synthetic systemic risk. It’s burned us a bunch of times already and it’s gonna do it again. Those giant global re-insurance pools are almost certainly fine, and worth the risk, if we just use them for their intended purpose. But history shows that we’ll end up creating derivatives contracts on them and those contracts will get leveraged. Those leveraged pools end up merging and turning into giant financial time bombs.