I begrudgingly get insurance for certain things because I hear enough times how insurance will find a way to avoid paying for even those supposed protections. I hear that plenty times from homeowners where insurance refuses to cover anything they should have paid for due to improper evidence and it’d have been cheaper to save and invest the money spent instead of going through the adjusters while, say, waiting for a new roof. Then there’s the costs once you do eventually file and receive a legitimate claim for your liability (the primary upside of group insurance as a policyholder) and many insurers will refuse to carry you going forward. So it’s almost a one time benefit for many. On the flip side, insurance fraud exists but is definitely prosecutable while I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone winning against an insurance company’s lawyers for being denied a claim unjustfully.
This is a serious topic, and it turns out that the relationship of insured-insurer is just really complicated.
Moral hazard and adverse selection are real issues insurance faces: that being covered makes the insured more reckless, and that people with higher risk self-select to sign up for insurance.
OTOH, insurance companies make more money the less claims they pay.
I think serious topics need to be discussed a lot more because the things that cost Americans the most day-to-day are housing, healthcare, and arguably insurance (when it doesn't work for them) - all of these things are "complicated" and it's as if we stop being able to talk about anything substantive anymore as a society. Forget the death of long form journalism, how about longer, serious discussions? Every other person I talk to about these things just doesn't seem to care and it's pretty much "X is hard, let's go shopping" left and right, including from people that are otherwise rather educated and smart. We seem to be too exhausted for whatever reason to learn enough to act rationally, which is rather important for a capitalist system like we have. This tendency goes all sorts of ways from political topics to nonsense like anti-vaxxers and so forth.
Nobody ever liked shopping for insurance. Nobody ever liked trying to find a job. Nobody ever liked "find a market niche" and "marketing their unique skillset." The Neoliberal fantasy is that all life choices are reducible to consumer decisions, and people love to pull out their spreadsheets and calculators and make those decisions in the most rational way possible, and it just isn't true. We want healthcare, we don't want to shop around for health insurance every single year, terrified that we will die (or be bankrupted) if we make the wrong decision. We want meaningful work, we don't want to negotiate terms on 85 different freelance contracts per year. We want government services, we don't want to stand in line at 87 different agencies and try to understand the difference between SNAP and CANF or the DMV vs the DPS vs the County vs the City. We want a home, we don't want to read the tea-leaves of what the Federal Reserve is doing with interest rates and what the Case-Shiller index says this quarter. We want a good education for our children, not a consumer choice amongst 3 different competing charter schools.
In general, we want to run our lives like people instead of like miniature conglomerates. Peoples' tendency not to want to live like automata is not the problem: the problem is the system they are trapped in which forces them to live as automata.
Sadly, even worker's compensation insurance that the state runs and that one is required to pay into by the state is the same way. I only wish I could stop paying the premiums to these crooks because I sure as fuck can't get treatment for the injuries I sustained on the job. If I have a few thousand dollars to get a lawyer and pay witnesses and get super lucky, maybe I could get treatment but I'd rather spend that money on actual healthcare than gambling on insurance. Some insurance is just a scam to steal money (Washington State worker's compensation) indeed. That's how America treats its workers steal from then and leave them on their own to deal with their pain. Insurance my motherfucking ass.
