Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K

The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.

If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.

Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.

You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.

For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance.

The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.

I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.

It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.

The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.

--

0: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/hp548

More like some the people in Ohio or Maine or Wisconsin pays for both. CA and FL are both natural disaster dense compared to the colder states.

Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.

Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.

> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film)