Insurance companies don't mind insuring risks that they know will happen at some point, e.g. most property policies will have some claims, and life term contracts (as have been stated below) of course will have a claim at some point (unless the policy is lapsed). However, they have an idea of how often and how costly these claims will be, and through risk pooling diversification, this is lower (per policy) than the cost to the individual. Thus there is an incentive to buy the policy, and an incentive to sell it - as the difference can be made as profit to the insurer.
In addition there's a timing element to insurance: insurers take in premiums "now" for claims that will be paid out "later", so they can invest the money in the meantime. Large insurance companies may have $200bn investment portfolios.
EDIT: So the point is that flood insurance can of course be sold by private companies, however they know the risk is too high and won't offer competitive premiums. If we only had private flood insurance in the US, in the long term this would lead to people having to move to places with cheaper flood insurance. In this way it actively promotes people moving away from risky places (which I think is a good thing) - but it makes it difficult for people in the short term.
It gets handled this way for the same reason our government provides welfare et al: it makes no sense as a business, but the cost to the nation to do nothing is a bigger problem.
I think the bigger issue is that there is an inherent incompatibility between free markets (or strict laissez faire, non-intervention of any kind) and democracy. Of course people, in the millions, are going to say "help us" and direct it at their various layers of government, and punish those who don't at the election booth.
Therefore it stands to reason in major floods like this, that everyone is going to get some kind of relief even if they didn't have flood insurance. What I'm not sure of is whether the insured get 100% payouts and those not insured get partial payouts? What's the incentive to have flood insurance, except in smaller, localized, 50 or 100 year floods?
This is asset destruction and the only way to properly handle it is through savings. So it's either made compulsory or you do end up with something of a free loader problem. Whether that free loader problem is a real problem, I don't know.
The industry also feels B makes selling flood insurance a bad idea. That said, there are Private policies you can buy in some areas.
PS: Insurance companies like frequent small scale random events like car accidents, because they are easy to plan for.
i don't quite see that.
if the flood insurer covered a broad variety of geographically dispersed areas across North America, or even just the US, would that be true?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1993
Edit: fix an extraneous wording mistake.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/02/apples-cash-hoard-swells-to-...
A statement with profound implications in other areas of insurance, notably health insurance. You're insuring against expensive losses that will almost certainly happen at some point... which suggests that traditional insurance isn't the right framework for solving the problem at hand.
Just like the government provides fire protection in the form of fire departments, the government needs to provide health care. What we are doing currently is broken.
you've just outlined a money-losing system run by the government.
the reason private health insurance systems fail is not merely because everyone needs it at some point. it's because everyone uses much more of it than they've paid for with their premiums. (which is why, pre-Obamacare, insurance companies used to reject applicants with pre-existing conditions and why they put lifetime caps on benefits paid.)
but a government run single-payer system is not magic. the extra cash must come from somewhere.
one way a single-payer system could obtain the additional funds needed is by taking cash from some other government source (which is exactly what Obamacare does when it provides refundable tax credits to help low income people pay their otherwise unaffordable health insurance premiums.) but there's no end to the amount of money that could require.
another thing the government can do is limit services to patients, i.e. take a certain amount of decision making authority, by law, away from individuals, especially old individuals who are very sick. ("i'm sorry, but we're not paying for that new chemotherapy. it's hospice care for you.")
in addition, a single-payer system can also uniformly limit the prices health care providers, pharma companies, hospitals, etc can charge. (i.e take some decision making authority away from that sector of the economy, again, by law.)
First, how it is paid. It's text book socialism. People pay into it based on ability and receive benefits based on need. It doesn't run at a loss.
Second, the level of care. Basically the government puts a lower bound on health care and uses taxation to do it. You're guaranteed a basic level of care regardless of your situation. You can opt for private insurance that stacks on top of that. A basic level of treatment is covered by the government, but anything experimental or exorbitant you will likely have to pay yourself, unless you have the aforementioned gold-plated insurance. Insurance is much cheaper because it only needs to cover unusual care, but of course I do pay a lot of taxes.
It's not different from a private system, because you can't receive unlimited care, but unlike a private system you're always guaranteed a minimum care.
In the case of these massive flooding, it's hard to make the pool big enough. That's why reinsurance companies exist, which can mix the risk pool of different types and locals.
Origin story for Lloyd's of London:
The patrons bet, for example, on whether Admiral John Byng would be shot for his incompetence in a naval battle with the French. He was.
The gentlemen of Lloyd's would have had no qualms about taking my bet on my own life.
Edward Lloyd realised his customers were as thirsty for information to fuel their bets as they were for coffee, and began to assemble a network of informants and a newsletter full of information about foreign ports, tides, and the comings and goings of ships.
His newsletter became known as Lloyd's List.
Lloyd's coffee house hosted ship auctions, and gatherings of sea captains who would share stories.
If someone wished to insure a ship, that could be done too: a contract would be drawn up, and the insurer would sign his name underneath - hence the term "underwriter". It became hard to say quite where coffee-house gambling ended and formal insurance began.
Usually, both. Plus, if you had high expenses they'd actively search for an (even unrelated) pre-existing condition as a pretext to cancel your coverage (recission).
That is called single payer, government provided coverage. I would support that.
That is not remotely what Obamacare does. Obamacare requires private insurance to cover people with pre-existing conditions and it requires everyone to buy private insurance. It is busted as all fuck and I would like to see it go die in a fire.
I am aware what we were doing before Obamacare sucks and we need a real solution and to not simply go back to that. But this is not a real solution.
> Obamacare requires private insurance to cover people with pre-existing conditions and it requires everyone to buy private insurance.
So does single payer, we just call "buying" taxes and we replace insurers with government. You're still forced to pay and the insurer is still forced to provide for everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. So it would seem you're simply against the name Obamacare.
> But this is not a real solution.
It's not supposed to be, everyone isn't blind, they see that single payer is the solution, but you can't simply declare the private insurance industry we already have dead in one fell swoop. Obamacare or something just like Obamacare is a necessary step to get to single payer. We need to get everyone into a public option, and then have that option slowly kill off private insurance by simply operating cheaper than they can until the public option is pretty much what is insuring everyone, at that point, it's effectively single payer.
Just charge more money for your insurance. Boom! Profitable business.
The bet is more like, "I will pay you X amount of money if your damages from flooding exceed your deductible within the next year." It's not at all given that it will flood at all this year, or that your losses will exceed the deductible.
It's true that it would require substantial diversification or re-insurance, since flooding is a clustering event.
So it’s about determining the expected value of losses for a given risk. You’re right that given a long enough time, there is a near-certain chance of a flood, but the question is more about how much that’s likely to cost.
That is entirely insurance.
The reason is that most human settlements occur in flood plains because we cannot live without water. We drink it. We bath in it. We irrigate crops with it. Flood plains have fertile soil. We use rivers and oceans for essential cargo transit.
Insurance is about risk management. It is a form of betting. And there is no bet here because there is no question of if it will flood. The question is only when will it flood?
That's a fool's bet to say "I will pay you X amount of money if it floods" when it is guaranteed to flood sooner or later. That amounts to charity, not insurance.