Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky

Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by bvan on Saturday April 06, 2024 @01:51PM (#39954091)

Insurance works on the basis of (a) quantifying risk and (b) charging fairly for the protection. In the long-term, getting better at (a) and consequently, (b), is in everybody’s interest. For far too long, certain risk covers have been under-charged. At the end of the day, difficulty in finding affordable insurance, or any insurance at all, tells you something about the level of risk and the ability of insurers to charge appropriately for it. Regulators are often way behind the curve, to the detriment of insurers and consumers.

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by _tom_ on Saturday April 06, 2024 @04:22PM (#39955170)

And (c) in the long term influence the risk. Insurance companies have long worked to improve auto safety. This benefits everyone. This needs to be applied to more significant risks, like fire flood and storm.

I think we have to get much more serious about prevention. People are doing this:

Fire safety:

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195331310/red-roof-house-fir...

Storm safety:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/mexico-beach-home-survives-hurrica...

We need to mandate this kind of building in new construction and modified construction.

It may be worthwhile to subsidize this, to help with turning existing high risks into low risks.

We need to be more severe on forbidding building in danger zones, and more accepting of insurers pricing these based on risk, so they don't have to leave the state, and others can be priced to more common levels of risk.

We also need to not allow rebuilding in areas that will have these problems again, without some way of mitigating. We should not have to pay for someone's third house in a flood zone. But if you can make it flood proof after the first one, great.

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by imgabe on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:22PM (#39955696)

> This needs to be applied to more significant risks, like fire flood and storm.

It is. The NFPA (National Fire Protection Agency) writes the National Electric Code and other safety codes that get adopted into law as building codes. It was started by a coalition of insurance agencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fire_Protection_Assoc...

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by knallfrosch on Saturday April 06, 2024 @04:06PM (#39955039)

Climate change is coming for America’s property market Insurance is supposed to signal risk. Policymakers should let it https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/09/21/climate-change-...

Parts of America are becoming uninsurable Blame growth in hazardous areas, climate change and bad policy https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/09/21/parts-of-...

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by rchaud on Saturday April 06, 2024 @03:09PM (#39954643)

If this were true, health insurers would have taken a cudgel to the US hospital system decades ago and come up with a more efficient system. They haven't because an opaque system allows them to maintain their own opaque practices.

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by selectodude on Saturday April 06, 2024 @03:39PM (#39954828)

Health insurance companies don’t care about what your doctor earns in the same way home insurance companies don’t care about the cost of the roofer. They’re going to price in whatever that cost may be and call it a day.

Health insurance has it easier too because there’s not really a concept of correlated risk in human populations. Most people do a decent job avoiding hurting themselves but when a flood comes, there’s not a whole lot anybody can do.

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by jenny91 on Saturday April 06, 2024 @04:44PM (#39955332)

COVID?

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by chug on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:02PM (#39955494)

Health insurance companies do actually care, unfortunately. They're incentivized to embrace higher prices since they have to spend at least 80% of premiums on payouts. If you have a fixed margin, well, you have to increase premiums to increase profit, so higher prices means more profit.

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Re:Insurers Are Spying on Your Home from the Sky by bvan on Saturday April 06, 2024 @09:12PM (#39957248)

Property insurance and health or life insurance are very different markets.

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