Well, you need insurance, because I’m pretty sure you can’t afford the payment for when you, say, crush both my legs.
I never understood why it’s legally mandatory to pay a private company just for the privilege to drive a metal death box (death metal box?) on poorly maintained yet tax payer-funded roads or get punished with debt if I don’t?
Sounds like we need co-op insurance?
Its like gambling, I bet 100 bucks something will happen to my car this month. Damn nothing happened, lost again.
It’s not gambling, it’s risk aversion. They are not the same. It’s assuring you’re protected from harm by distributing out the costs in case of harm, that any individual couldn’t handle.
Gambling the goal is to get money. Insurance the goal is distributed liability so that possible danger will not bankrupt you. You still often can not come out ahead with an insurance payout, but hopefully won’t come out bankrupt.
That’s part of why medical insurance is so bad these days is because it doesn’t even prevent that. But it’s still an insurance, and not one that you want paying out.
Hell, not all insurance is even monetary --conceptually, saving grain silos for drought and famine is still insurance.
Except you know legally required.
Forced. And raped.
This already exists, and they are called unit linked insurance plans. Basically the insurance company provides you some units in an investment/trust fund, in addition to the policy benefit, for your premiums (obviously higher to compensate).
They are actually much scammier, because the insurance company administers the unit fund as well, and the fees are often much higher than if you just buy the policy and an exchange traded trust/fund separately. They were formulated by insurance companies basically for the sole purpose of bamboozling people who echo this meme. Back in the day, door to door insurance salespeople would say “even if you never claim, you still get a payout!”.
Unit-linked insurance plan - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit-linked_insurance_plan
Any guesses as to how much money would be in the pool if every person in your country paid into a single pool for automotive insurance? I bet that if such a pool existed, then there would be a lot of motivation to use that money to reduce the risk of paying out. Which makes me wonder if public transit is better in countries with national health insurance as a result of the national health insurance.
In BC, Canada, auto insurance is managed by the government. We have low insurance rates to begin with, and then we get a cheque in the mail at the end of the year if they collect more premiums than they pay out. (It’s not a straight annual thing, of course. I don’t know the details, but over the longer term it’s how it works.)
It’s kinda weird not having any sales pressure, too. They aren’t at all light about upselling extra features. I only just found out that for ~$30/yr, I can add replacement car coverage to my plan. Over a lifetime, that’s like $2K to never need to worry about a collision leaving you unable to drive for more than like a day to get a rental.
Didn’t always have cheap insurance. The government before this one looted that extra auto insurance pool money to put into the general coffers so that they could claim the budget was in the black instead of the red, rather than send it back to people, and they charged like 50-100% more for insurance to begin with.
German here, the answer is no. Our public transit is crumbling left and right. Our health insurance too though. Serves us right for voting conservatives into power again and again for the last 30 years.
I have to imagine the tail wags the dog both ways in that scenario. Better public transport feeds into better public health outcomes, and nationalised healthcare (should) have a vested interest in reducing auto reliance for myriad reasons.
its a MLM, just like health insurance. theres no guaranteed they will cover your cost in damages some of the time.
I have never had a claim my entire life. I’m pretty sure that I’ve paid more in car insurance than for the fucking car itself. But I’m happy to socialize the cost of some SUV lunatic that does millions in damage while looking at the phone.
Term life is cheaper than whole life, and generally a much much better deal long term. What this person is proposing is car insurance that works like whole life insurance.
Insurance is valid, profit from insurance is where it gets problematic cause the whole point of insurance is to have a similar average outcome, just less extremes in the worse case scenario.
Funny enough, if somebody offers you insurance that builds cash value, even though the sound of it does make sense you should probably run.
I’ve never heard of this. Why should I run?
The price of insurance only covers the statistically predicted amount of payoffs to all people insured plus a profit. If you’re building a cash value, then that’s priced in, with more profit priced in for them on the equity youve built. You’re better off pocketing the difference.
Right, I would assume it’s an investment vehicle with the extra margin built in. This is why insurance should only be in the largest pools with no profit interference and only the lowest administrative overhead possible.
I used to be with a mutual insurance, which was still actually a mutual insurance, meaning the customers were also the shareholders. I got a small dividend most years out of whatever surplus existed.
Wish we could have that for fire insurance in California but the company would go belly up by the end of the month.
I first thought of starting a nonprofit insurance (all kinds) 40 years ago. It really is that obvious a market. Risk pool is always better when it’s bigger. Obama care did something, but not enough.
Just don’t own a car?
Not always possible /shrug
That sounds like a much bigger problem than mandatory insurance.
Conversely, you can also just drive around with no insurance at all and still do all the safety things and be terribly careful as if you had insurance.
Most can probably go through life without ever having to use the insurance or be stopped by the police.
And if you ever do get into an accident, if it’s not that serious, you’ll end up paying the same amount up front as you did if you had made regular payments over many years.
If it’s serious, no matter how you deal with it it’s going to be expensive … with insurance it will cost you … without insurance you’ll probably end up in prison.
Tune in for more from my TED talk
Most can probably go through life without ever having to use the insurance or be stopped by the police.
this is anecdotally super wrong.
I drive like 15,000 km a year (VERY LITTLE) - in the past 20 years I’ve hit probably a half dozen ride programs and been rear ended twice by someone else while fully stopped at a red light
While I’ve never had to actually file an insurance claim, there have been plenty of times I’ve had to present it
Many police now use automatic scanning to check for valid registration or insurance. There are also some heavy penalties for driving without insurance. Something like a simple RIDE check (impaired driving check point) could reveal you have no insurance and you could face a lisence suspension. You could also be subject to an expensive lawsuit if you do hit an expensive car in an at fault accident.
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Where I live, the part of the car insurance that covers damages on others and their property is mandatory.
The insurance for yourself and your own car is optional, but I think it’s fair to require some kind of guarantee that you can cover the potential damages that you are able to do to others with a car.
Cops will stop you, if you don’t have the mandatory insurance, have unpaid car taxes, use fake license plates or skipped the EU check. Police cars have automatic license plate recognition to check that sort of thing.
