• @[email protected]
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    271 day ago

    The problem is not on the side of mandating the insurance though. It is on the insurance being able to wiggle itself out as well as not requiring insurance companies to have sufficient liquidity for these kind of events.

    • @[email protected]
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      2122 hours ago

      If we’re at the point of mandating insurance then the government should just provide it themselves out of taxes. No reason for profit middlemen should be involved in basic public necessities.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 hours ago

        So how do you address the varying risk and values of the places? Would you like your taxes to pay for the rebuilding of a 20,000,000 movistar mansion?

        Of course the government could also run a public housing insurance, but that also becomes a whole can of worms politically.

        • @surewhynotlem
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          921 hours ago

          Presumably they pay more into the government insurance if they have more to insure. Like we do today with normal insurance. You just call it taxes since you can’t opt out. Which is fine because there are laws already saying you can’t opt out.

          The issue is just with middlemen being incentivized to deny claims to increase profits. With government running it, there’s no profit motive so that is fixed.

        • @[email protected]
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          622 hours ago

          Your property tax would be assessed based on the value of your home so the homeowner would be paying for it. Or if nothing happens to theirs a bunch of poorer homes. It’d work just like how insurance does. There’s just no profit motive so you don’t have to deal with the shenanigans from that.

          • @[email protected]
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            18 hours ago

            The price should be [cost to rebuild an identical house] * [expected monthly risk of catching fire]

            Invest the yearly excess into something stable to pay for when a large wildfire happens and a large amount has to be paid.

            Property values shouldn’t be part of the equation because they’re massively overinflated and rather useless.

            The risk part is extremely important because houses built out of matches should probably cost more to insure than houses built with fire safety in mind.

            • @[email protected]
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              218 hours ago

              I mean I’m not an insurance adjuster so if your method is better than sure. The point is that what you were taxed for your house would pay for the insurance. So a more expensive house would pay more (and contribute more to the overall system when they didn’t have a fire).

              • @[email protected]
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                215 hours ago

                Sorry, I wasn’t quite clear.

                What I meant is that more expensive houses should pay more insurance - just that the property value of the house is usually not the correct metric for determining whether a house is expensive. After all, it takes hardly any cost to reconstruct a lawn even though every square foot of lawn raises the property value.

                Plus it can help prevent gentrification to avoid your insurance skyrocketing the moment an investor turns every property in your neighborhood into luxury flats.

    • @[email protected]
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      23 hours ago

      They should have the same rigorous stress testing requirements as imposed on financial institutions. Banks and bank regulators learned from 2008 time for insurance regulators to wake up.