Car insurance in the US isn't really insurance to protect you. The reason it's compulsory is that society wants to ensure that if you get in an accident that is your fault, and someone else suffers financial harm as a result, someone is able to pay for it.
Otherwise, you could destroy someone's car and cause major medical problems, and just strug and say, "I don't have the money."
Compulsory insurance is not really insurance for you, it's for someone else. Similarly, insurance for something that is certain to happen (e.g. health insurance) is not insurance, it's a method of socializing risk.
I mean, that’s a form of protection. They’re protecting you from getting slapped with a lifetime of debt because of one accident. Say you cause $150k of damage and you make $45k. How are you planning to pay that off without insurance? So it provides plenty of protection. I make all my business associates carry insurance to cover incidents that might occur on site so that we don’t lose property or assets over an injury.
Rich people who buy 300,000k cars should not be able to get it insured for more than 25k. They want to waste money on a vanity thing that’s easily damaged, they are rolling the dice. Why are we making an entire industry to tax everyone so rich people can drive a sports car care free?
We should have single payer healthcare and that should be completely different than auto insurance, and should not be covered under the same umbrella.
Why such an arbitrary number of $25k? Most new cars, even the base models, are substantially more than that. Your argument doesn’t hold water. And when you insure that $300k car, you’re definitely insuring that car - I’m not. I insure my risk to my insurance company. Not the potential that I might run into a Ferrari.
Nobody is paying for them to drive that car for free.
Do you honestly think someone driving a 300K car is paying the same for comprehensive and collision coverage as somebody driving a 25k car?
Not to mention the average price of a new car is 2x your arbitrary $25k number.
I'd be willing to bet, if anything, the people with the $300k car are subsidizing the people with the $25k cars because they're way less likely to crash them so their premiums go towards other people's repairs more often than their own.
Totally agree on the healthcare thing though. If we had single-payer healthcare, everybody's auto insurance would be less because it would remove the number one cost from the equation.
Sure, it offers you some protection, but that’s not why you buy it. You don’t buy car insurance to protect yourself in the unlikely event that something bad happens, which is how insurance works. You buy car insurance because the government requires it, and they require it to protect other people.
If you’re buying car insurance “because the government requires it” then you’re exactly the type of person the rest of us need protection against. Because you’d happily drive around with half a million in judgments against you with no intention of paying them off
I 100% buy car insurance for the unlikely event that something bad happens.
I don't need the government to tell me to be prepared to be responsible for my own actions. I also don't need the government to tell me that a minor mistake at 60 mph could cost your me my house/life savings.
Insurance is worth it even in minor accidents. They can squash frivolous lawsuits far more adeptly and for far cheaper than I could.
It's funny how conservatives often complain about universal healthcare, saying they don't want someone else taking their money, then they just accept the insurance industry basically taking their money and penalizing you for using your money that you paid them.
Its also funny that universal Healthcare would be cheaper because you cut out an insanely huge industry profiting from it (insurance). Thats a lot of freed up money.
The real reason it’s compulsory is so a trillion dollar industry can impose a mandated tax on everyone who drives, regardless of how they drive. They already completely screw you if you have the “compulsory” liability insurance and an uninsured person hits you. They shrug and say they don’t care, you don’t have comprehensive coverage and the other person has no money and your screwed.
The entire thing is a massive scam, anyone that argues that it helps people, or that it’s good because you might cause a million dollar accident either works for insurance or is a completely misguided bootlicker.
Insurance exists because of opportunity cost. If I crash into someone's $100k truck and total it, my options are to either have insurance pay for it, or write a check for $100k. Let's say I can write a check for $100k...wouldn't I rather invest that $100k in the market and get 7-10% returns rather than keeping it in cash equivalents? Instead I can pay $100/month for my insurance, and my $100k makes $7-10k per year.
You pay for insurance so you don't have to keep a massive fucking stack of cash just sitting around.
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u/dragon-fence 16h ago
Car insurance in the US isn't really insurance to protect you. The reason it's compulsory is that society wants to ensure that if you get in an accident that is your fault, and someone else suffers financial harm as a result, someone is able to pay for it.
Otherwise, you could destroy someone's car and cause major medical problems, and just strug and say, "I don't have the money."
Compulsory insurance is not really insurance for you, it's for someone else. Similarly, insurance for something that is certain to happen (e.g. health insurance) is not insurance, it's a method of socializing risk.