Re:Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she pred...
by derefr on Monday June 15, 2020 @11:33AM
(#23528424)
Is there a third term for something like "flood insurance", where there will definitely be a flood at some point—you're building on a floodplain—but not necessarily one within the lifetime of the policy, such that in theory profit can be made off of e.g. business that open, get insured, operate for years, and then close, without the flooding ever happening.
...but where there is a legal requirement for everyone in the area to "get insured" so that they don't have to lean on FEMA, and therefore in practice there's the opposite effect to the distribution of risk under public healthcare: rather than forcing healthy people who will get negligible benefit from their policies to get insured, such a requirement forces the insurance company to not be playing the lottery by offering only short-term policies that can maybe avoid a flood, but instead fixes them into always ending up covering a resulting flood (and therefore almost always defaulting in such cases and needing reinsurance coverage.)
...but where there is a legal requirement for everyone in the area to "get insured" so that they don't have to lean on FEMA, and therefore in practice there's the opposite effect to the distribution of risk under public healthcare: rather than forcing healthy people who will get negligible benefit from their policies to get insured, such a requirement forces the insurance company to not be playing the lottery by offering only short-term policies that can maybe avoid a flood, but instead fixes them into always ending up covering a resulting flood (and therefore almost always defaulting in such cases and needing reinsurance coverage.)