• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    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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      321 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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        920 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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        621 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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            fedilink
            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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              fedilink
              214 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.