alt Hacker News>The whole private insurance system is a scam at every level.
All for profit insurance must by definition bring in more than it pays out. From cars to homes to health to pets.
If instead of paying all your premiums, you'd be far more likely to be able to afford the services that the insurers are supposedly paying for. Like, yeah, there's a chance you need a new engine, and a small chance that all of your monthly car insurance totals up to less than the cost of the engine, but the entire point of the company is that they know that it is far more likely that you will end up paying more for their service than you'd have actually payed for turns out the only thing that ever went wrong was a small crack in your windshield.
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> All for profit insurance must by definition bring in more than it pays out. From cars to homes to health to pets.
Well yes, but you are paying for reduced variance, which itself has a value.
On car insurance, you have a competitive market with actuaries trying to identify actual risks, and that, with their prices, modify bad behavior and purchases of cars that are expensive to repair. So all in all, you can end up with very narrow margins, and end up ahead only on the float between receiving premiums and paying out. Health insurance, especially how it works in the US, with no public system williyto cover all the expensive stuff for catastrophic situations and chronic conditions, would compete by trying to fail to insure risky people. But since most insurance is handled by employers, all the levers for that fail too, so it's an especially bad insurance system. Home insurance, car insurance, normal life insurance... all more competitive and more beneficial economically, as their efforts lower costs overall.