• optional@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    10 hours ago

    You can change the system all the way you want. But even a co-operative insurance in a communist society will have to spend money on other things beyond damage claims. Thus even they will take more money from the insuree, than they pay out.

    Even if your insurance is only a pot where everyone throws their money in, and takes it back out when they need to, someone still had to buy the pot.

    It doesn’t matter how you organise it, paying insurance premiums will – on average – always be a loss. That’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it’s just a fact. The important part of insurances is the “on average”: The vast majority of people will never cause a million dollar damage, so they can pay a tiny share of the damages caused by the one unlucky person who does.

    Instead of being mad that you paid for the car insurance and never needed it, you should be happy that you didn’t end up in a car crash, destroying someones life. Instead of being sad that you paid for your health insurance for 90 years without ever needing it, you should be happy that you aren’t the one who had to spend years in hospitals fighting cancer. And instead of paying an insurance premium for your phone, you should put that money in a piggy bank and take it out if your phone ever gets stolen.

    • Lemminary@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 hours ago

      will have to spend money on other things beyond damage claims

      Isn’t that what the government does with everything else? I don’t understand why this is a special case. They already take in a whole lot more taxes than they give out in services, and that’s fine. It’s understood that there’s an operational cost. But insurance, as it stands, is arguably little more than a mandatory cost for the great majority of people.

      Instead of being mad that you paid

      I’m not mad that I pay for services. I’m upset that people being denied claims, that not even a fraction of the money paid in for decades is available for other kinds of emergencies or basic needs because it’s a money sink where it all disappears under the nebulous excuse that you may need it some day under some specific circumstances, that it’s mandatory to buy into this system, that it’s being touted as a necessity without giving a chance to alternative systems, and that the execs do everything in their power like raising premiums over BS solely for profit at the expense of people’s well-being. There’s really no need to excuse this system.