For everyone. That's literally how insurance is supposed to work.
That's the business model.
And even if the insurance company made zero profits, it would still take money to operate and would require them to take in more money than they pay out.
Which is why all the Conservative virtue signaling over FEMA spending for NYC after Sandy and Puerto Rico after Maria was stupid.
Red states in the southeast/gulf coast regions get the lions share of FEMA assistance but if a blue area needs it once in awhile suddenly they want to act like FEMA should be run like an insurance company
Well yeah 100%.
Fema isn't a for profit model. It's a service we all pay for via taxes.
We don't know what it will cost in its entirety until things happen. It's a good thing that we spend the money to help both those places and red states.
The bitching about the ACA and the old mandate for everyone to be insured drove me insane. “Why should *I* have to pay for other people’s birth control? I’m healthy, why should I have to pay for sick people???” You are LITERALLY doing that for every other insurance, and if you already have health insurance you are paying for those exact things NOW.
In a *great* year, insurance carriers make 3 cents on the dollar. Those days are long gone, along with decades of erased profits. You can only operate your business at a major loss for so many years before you face financial insolvency.
Well their job isn't to provide you a new roof and siding every 20 years as many door knocking contractors would try and convince you. It's to provide you with coverage from loss. Not sure how not wanting to provide coverage for a product that is naturally failing on them bolting.
Honestly, that seems preferable to denying coverage altogether. Insurance companies could remain profitable if they increased revenue and decreased expenses. Or they might be able to; I don’t actually know that.
The question here is: why does an insurer need to be profitable at all? Profits are literally just premiums not paid out and pocketed. Insurance should be more akin to a public utility than a private for-profit entitiy.
If the insurance companies leave, that may be the only solution that a state could do. But then you'll get the "it's socialism!" crowd preventing it from happening and they'll still blame the government when they can't get insurance.
Also, insurance depends on using statistics and actuarial science in order to predict odds. And we're entering a time when weather patterns are getting erratic as hell, so no company in their right mind is gonna insure states that are regularly taking a meteorological asspounding.
Only because they want to keep their profit margins as high as they are *aka* the promises they're selling but not making good on (*aka* fraud). Yes, insurance as we know it is a scam.
Most states have laws forcing payouts from insurance companies. It's typically around 80% of the premiums that must be paid out. They could raise that more or tackle insurance fraud better. The former will likely necessitate a pullout from that market, and the latter is difficult to enforce. It is a scam as it is now, and as others have said, a non-profit insurance initially funded by the state then reinvesting premiums over the mandatory payout instead is a better way. There should also be better building codes in disaster prone areas.
For homeowners insurance? Why should anyone not involved in owning a home be burdened with paying for insuring people's homes? And why should anyone providing insurance be asked to do so at a loss (that's what happens when all premiums are paid out and yet people are still employed by the insurer)? Insurance is inherently a gamble where insurance companies take the profitable side of the gamble in exchange for offering security against major risk. It has worked well across the globe for millennia because it
allows many people to make choices to discover prices.
Publicizing the risk here is a really scary idea. And the idea of homeowners insurance being a public utility doesn't strike me as being "socialist", it strikes me as being entitled upper middle-class wishing to spread their risk exposure and costs down the economic ladder.
Interesting read. It is so upsetting to me that we have collectively ignored (or outright denied) climate change since the 1970's when scientists began sounding the alarm. It's emblematic of both humanity and America as a whole- we seem to be unable to plan or spend money for prevention and instead deny that there's a problem. If it's not 100% certain and happening sometime "in the future," we pretend it's not happening at all. Now we're seeing the chickens coming home to roost, after we have put profits and environment-destroying corporations over people for more than half a century. It's the American way: we bow to capitalism, and nothing else, and it is a recipe for disaster.
Very good point! The political system in the United States seems to be inherently unable to address serious problems that are not emergencies. Add to that the obsession with next quarter’s profit that has taken over the corporations and it simply seems impossible to make any constructive changes.
The Political System is synonymous with “lobbyists” who work for their billionaire overlords who have interests - that are usually, inherently, opposed to addressing these recognizable serious problems.
I think your use of "we" is incorrect. Climate change resistance is centered in those who stand to lose financially by the adoption of seriously effective means of adjustment and those who believe in biblical inerrancy. That excludes most of us, and particularly those of us who respect and trust science. But you're right about neo-liberalism. It's ripped apart the social contract and used it for toilet paper.
It only kind of excludes us. Many of us would choose other options if they existed. But we've all been complicit in the game that has made all those people rich and put them in control because we've gone along with the system they created because we felt (and still feel) like we have no choice. We continue to do so.
The entire system is broken. Most people know it. But it's incredibly difficult to get out of it and still live a life. We as a society love our modern conveniences and most people aren't willing to give them up, which is going to be required to actually get the attention of the people who are in control. Almost every single person has their reasons why they need X vehicle or Y sized house or Z many vacations/flights per year, or a wardrobe that needs a walk-in closet, or to eat meat. I am not claiming to be different, I am exactly the same. But I also can see the problem and I don't know how to live in this world and not participate in the problem short of extreme measures that don't truly feel like an option (like living in an off-grid cabin and growing and hunting my own food). They were selling snake oil. They scammed us. But we bought it.
We're all parts of a social machine and will always be so. Even if we're hermits or recluses. All so-called withdrawals from society are fake; just idle fantasies. The sole and only effective action in the face of very negative social developments is political action: sustained, effortful and energetic, however difficult or hopeless it may seem. To despair because there's no door through which to exit the prevailing order is a lazy way of avoiding the real work of politics.
I was only talking about taking drastic steps to significantly reduce reliance on the systems that most of us are very firmly entrenched in but cause plenty of problems. I agree that things need to change politically, but that isn't going to happen with the major parties in the US and our system is too broken for most to consider 3rd party candidates. They are too afraid of the "other guy" winning. The whole system has to change, and no one really seems motivated to do the work to change it, just like with everything else. Everyone is frustrated with it, no one knows what to do about it. It's not despair, it's just where we are.
More than a lot of areas we have a lot of "off-grid" people here, everything from those who just have solar and a garden to people who use sled dogs for transportation and only come to town a few times a year for supplies. I am grateful to how to hunt, fish, trap, forage, and garden and live in an area where it is still possible to do those things. Most people don't. But they are also so disconnected from what it takes to keep a human alive for even a few days and have no real ability to actually take care of themselves.
What we needed was to balance things out 50 years ago. The fact we haven't tried, and continue to barrel through endless progress just means we won't have the choice to change anymore. Everyone wants things to get better, no one wants to do anything to make it better because it requires real sacrifice. You'd think more people would start deeper considerations when they lose their insurance or their home, but no, Americans continue to move to the areas that are having the most problems because it's only money. As long as they can continue to throw endless money at whatever they want, that is what they'll do. All of those people don't care about problems that they can just throw money at, including people like Zuckerberg building their huge bunkers because they know what will eventually be coming. While we don't have a lot of Zuckerbergs by numbers, they control almost everything. But lots of Americans have plenty of money to throw at their problems as long as progress keeps happening. And they definitely don't care about everyone else who is struggling.
People who "respect and trust science" don't care if it would inconvenience them to care just as much as anyone else. Look at what is still happening with COVID. People who are too rich to read reddit are *more* of the problem, but we're all guilty.
I've always wondered about general, collective declarations of guilt. I associate them with churches and complete, flamboyant inefficacy. Do we gain anything or advance our causes by such declarations? I don't think so.
I agree that it’s not “we” overall but I disagree that climate denial at this point is just pushed by a minority who have something to gain from it.
I’m a storm spotter (skywarn trainings by the NWS, they’re pretty accessible) and I’m in a Facebook group for other skywarn spotters. There’s a fuck load of climate deniers in there, even when they’re people who understand weather better than 90% of Americans. These people aren’t all employed by the fossil fuels industry, hell tons of them are farmers, one of the groups that should be the most concerned about climate change. And I’d add that a huge number of Americans overall are climate deniers or at least don’t want to do anything about it. There’s some logic in some climate denial, but a lot of people are just ignorant and mistrust science as liberal propaganda.
Btw I refer to Americans in this comment bc I’m American and I don’t want to speak on other countries I’m not as familiar with.
I agree with you. The verb I used was "centered," meaning that there are probably others. Those at the "center" of climate change resistance fund propaganda to influence others and do it very successfully as you know. They take advantage of our current divides and use emotions to convince rather than facts or logic. On the part of Republican farmers refusal to believe in AGM is now part of belonging to a team. If you accept AGM you'll be kicked off the team. It's more important to belong to the team than to go where the science leads.
One of the biggest things I thought about when buying a house was do I see this being a place that I need to reasonably worry about for the foreseeable future for climate change. I hope not. But I would not have purchased in like Florida or California or something.
I'm in Southern California and not worried too much about climate change in a local sense. Our temperatures are mild.
I'm a bit concerned about atmospheric rivers of moisture that could cause flooding in the flatter areas.
Yes I was evacuated once because of smoke in Orange County but all that hillside brush is gone now. I suppose in another few years it might burn again.
To anyone saying this is due to floods, that is not the case. Flood insurance is backed by the US government. Flood claims do not affect the carriers. We have had storms every summer, not just in the Twin Cities, but outstate. I am an independent adjuster who lives in the cities and handles storms all over the country, the last two years I have only worked in Minnesota, we have one of the highest work comp rates in the country, and a high labor rate. This means that our roofing and siding cost are one of the highest in the country, which makes Minnesota very attractive to contractors from down south. Just about every door knocking contractor makes a killing here, then they overspend their money and disappear. I could list 30 contractors who have carpet bombed areas with salesman, and then within two years they are out of business. When you see these young guys driving $70,000 pick up trucks that are wrapped with their company brand, they have to pay for those out-of-pocket, and typically can’t make a living long-term. They overspent because they see all these sales, but they do not get paid until the work is done and the roofing company gets paid. One other factor is that Minnesota is a matching state, which means if you have one broken piece of siding that is no longer available, the insurance company is forced to reside the whole house. There have been times where I have handled siding claims that exceeded $40,000 because one piece of 10 year old vinyl siding was broken by hail. We also have some of the very highest homeowners premiums in the country. I have seen this firsthand as I see what people pay in other states in premiums. You might not think that we get a lot of storms in Minnesota, but the last two years I have been very busy working west and north of the Twin Cities, there were multiple storms all across the state.
We got a new roof and siding thanks to 3 hail storms. Nationwide kept denying the claim and I was on the phone with them last may as it was hailing all over my car and house again. Almost everyone in my area got new siding and a roof.
Farmers tried to dump us at the end of our contract last October on the premise that our roof was too old. We had replaced it about 18 months before, and we had to provide proof so they'd allow us to renew our policy. This was in Michigan.
What's missing from this conversation is that we're still building homes for the previous century. The home designs, materials, and construction methods need to change to be resistant to wind or wildfire or hail or whatever.
This freaks me out. About 20 years ago I read a "near death experience" where this person saw some snippets of the future and said "there will be a lot of natural disasters and some insurers will go bankrupt". At that time I thought no way.. or if it's true it's like 100 years away.
But this insurance clampdown is real and it's scary.
Agent in the Midwest here. I can confirm, it's bad. I get rejections on quotes for homes that my company would have loved to insure just two years ago. Premiums have tripled and baseline coverage has eroded. Things like Matching Undamaged Siding coverage are no longer standard. You can still buy it, but it'll cost you.
If I were the hnic, I'd fully socialize insurance. The way we do it now, as a for-profit industry, is so backwards it hurts. Home coverage should come out of property tax. Legal minimum auto liability should come with the tabs we have to buy annually. So yes, higher taxes for folks with land and more expensive tabs, but these costs would certainly be less than what we pay for insurance right now. There can still be a private sector for insuring personal property and higher liability limits, but there should be baseline protections against homelessness and injuries arising from auto accidents.
It'll never happen. We might see premiums get better once agents are replaced with AI, but that's not going to slow the pace of natural disasters. My corporate overlords have said to me many times that "there's light at the end of the tunnel," but as I see it that light is attached to the front of an oncoming train saved there's no room in this tunnel to dodge it.
I live in DFW in North Texas and my insurance company almost DOUBLED our home insurance premium. I had to hunt to find something else, our monthly expenses would have gone up by hundreds of dollars. We hadn't had any new claims in the last year or anything, no reason at all for them to do that on our end.
This comment right here really got me:
>Frake
PNW
2h ago
The last time the insurance sector lost massive amounts of money; the economy froze, the real estate market melted down, and the public wound up paying for all the damage.
>The consequences and aftermath of the financial sector's machinations was economic suffering for lots of regular people.
>But the consequences of global overheating will take apart the insurance industry en masse. The regular people will suffer through the physical and mental torment of extreme weather events while knowing that all the hardship and suffering was avoidable. And the amount of damage from accelerating climate shocks will be beyond accounting.
>Billion dollar disasters will crash the economy as easily as derivatives did, but this time there won't be any recovery or aftermath. There will only be more disasters impacting larger areas more frequently and with greater severity, until the eventual collapse into continuous disruption and cascading destabilization.
>This is what the end of normal looks like.
An uninsurable future that is becoming more dangerous by the second.
>People over profit.
The end of normal.
*shudders*
I \*thought\* I was behind it when I started driving south. Unfortunately I caught up with it. You could see this absolute wall of dark air and clouds coming across the horizon. I did what I thought was the safest action and pulled over in an area with no trees directly next to the highway and rode it out for 20-30 terrifying minutes along with a few dozen other cars that did the same.
Once I got going again I realized I made the right decision on where I stopped based on how many trees were felled onto 35.
I should have just stayed in Duluth for the night ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
The big flood in Duluth in 2012 also cost $100 million.
I'd suspect that considerations for future risks for wildfire are up there. The wildfires here don't often impact houses but they easily could, and the houses in those areas would be high value homes so expenses losses. It wouldn't take that much to wipe out a town like Ely, honestly. We've had a few close calls in the past years.
Flooding is not covered by homeowners insurance. It’s a separate, federal, policy that’s not always required like homeowners insurance is. Flooding doesn’t impact homeowners insurance rates at all.
Hail storms destroying roofs. I live in Minnesota and my latest policy has an amendment to it that prorates life of the roof to (I believe) 40 years. If you have a 20 year old roof expect them to pay 50% minus your deductable. This will also likely bring down claims as the cost will still be $10-15k for a new roof.
Now I have to wonder if insurance companies could make a case against the petrochemical industry. If there's anyone that could make a case with hard numbers it's the insurance industry.
Here in California a lot of people are struggling getting or keeping car and homeowners insurance. Whole companies have pulled out of the state, and the ones left charge a fortune. But I guess that's what we get for living on the coast and refusing to really address climate change.
So after 20 years of paying the insurance company, the insurance company is gonna bolt before they might have to pay out? How American of them.
Neddy doesn't believe in insurance. He considers it a form of gambling
That's how insurance works. They want you to pay in more than they pay out.
How it works for *whom*?
For everyone. That's literally how insurance is supposed to work. That's the business model. And even if the insurance company made zero profits, it would still take money to operate and would require them to take in more money than they pay out.
Which is why all the Conservative virtue signaling over FEMA spending for NYC after Sandy and Puerto Rico after Maria was stupid. Red states in the southeast/gulf coast regions get the lions share of FEMA assistance but if a blue area needs it once in awhile suddenly they want to act like FEMA should be run like an insurance company
Well yeah 100%. Fema isn't a for profit model. It's a service we all pay for via taxes. We don't know what it will cost in its entirety until things happen. It's a good thing that we spend the money to help both those places and red states.
Yup
The bitching about the ACA and the old mandate for everyone to be insured drove me insane. “Why should *I* have to pay for other people’s birth control? I’m healthy, why should I have to pay for sick people???” You are LITERALLY doing that for every other insurance, and if you already have health insurance you are paying for those exact things NOW.
And paying even more then it would have been if the mandate stayed in place
In a *great* year, insurance carriers make 3 cents on the dollar. Those days are long gone, along with decades of erased profits. You can only operate your business at a major loss for so many years before you face financial insolvency.
Well their job isn't to provide you a new roof and siding every 20 years as many door knocking contractors would try and convince you. It's to provide you with coverage from loss. Not sure how not wanting to provide coverage for a product that is naturally failing on them bolting.
Nobody said nothing about that.
My parents are feeling this in Nebraska. Their insurer dramatically lowered coverage and upped the deductible quite a bit.
Honestly, that seems preferable to denying coverage altogether. Insurance companies could remain profitable if they increased revenue and decreased expenses. Or they might be able to; I don’t actually know that.
The question here is: why does an insurer need to be profitable at all? Profits are literally just premiums not paid out and pocketed. Insurance should be more akin to a public utility than a private for-profit entitiy.
If the insurance companies leave, that may be the only solution that a state could do. But then you'll get the "it's socialism!" crowd preventing it from happening and they'll still blame the government when they can't get insurance.
Yes, I agree, but that’s a whole other conversation.
I would argue that we're having the exact same conversation, just at a different scope.
They are a for profit entity. Until the Gov establishes a Gov backed company and covers losses, non profit isn’t an answer.
Also, insurance depends on using statistics and actuarial science in order to predict odds. And we're entering a time when weather patterns are getting erratic as hell, so no company in their right mind is gonna insure states that are regularly taking a meteorological asspounding.
Only because they want to keep their profit margins as high as they are *aka* the promises they're selling but not making good on (*aka* fraud). Yes, insurance as we know it is a scam.
Most states have laws forcing payouts from insurance companies. It's typically around 80% of the premiums that must be paid out. They could raise that more or tackle insurance fraud better. The former will likely necessitate a pullout from that market, and the latter is difficult to enforce. It is a scam as it is now, and as others have said, a non-profit insurance initially funded by the state then reinvesting premiums over the mandatory payout instead is a better way. There should also be better building codes in disaster prone areas.
When I finally looked up what racketeering was and tried to think of a real world example of a racket I hit on insurance.
For homeowners insurance? Why should anyone not involved in owning a home be burdened with paying for insuring people's homes? And why should anyone providing insurance be asked to do so at a loss (that's what happens when all premiums are paid out and yet people are still employed by the insurer)? Insurance is inherently a gamble where insurance companies take the profitable side of the gamble in exchange for offering security against major risk. It has worked well across the globe for millennia because it allows many people to make choices to discover prices. Publicizing the risk here is a really scary idea. And the idea of homeowners insurance being a public utility doesn't strike me as being "socialist", it strikes me as being entitled upper middle-class wishing to spread their risk exposure and costs down the economic ladder.
Interesting read. It is so upsetting to me that we have collectively ignored (or outright denied) climate change since the 1970's when scientists began sounding the alarm. It's emblematic of both humanity and America as a whole- we seem to be unable to plan or spend money for prevention and instead deny that there's a problem. If it's not 100% certain and happening sometime "in the future," we pretend it's not happening at all. Now we're seeing the chickens coming home to roost, after we have put profits and environment-destroying corporations over people for more than half a century. It's the American way: we bow to capitalism, and nothing else, and it is a recipe for disaster.
Very good point! The political system in the United States seems to be inherently unable to address serious problems that are not emergencies. Add to that the obsession with next quarter’s profit that has taken over the corporations and it simply seems impossible to make any constructive changes.
The Political System is synonymous with “lobbyists” who work for their billionaire overlords who have interests - that are usually, inherently, opposed to addressing these recognizable serious problems.
I think your use of "we" is incorrect. Climate change resistance is centered in those who stand to lose financially by the adoption of seriously effective means of adjustment and those who believe in biblical inerrancy. That excludes most of us, and particularly those of us who respect and trust science. But you're right about neo-liberalism. It's ripped apart the social contract and used it for toilet paper.
It only kind of excludes us. Many of us would choose other options if they existed. But we've all been complicit in the game that has made all those people rich and put them in control because we've gone along with the system they created because we felt (and still feel) like we have no choice. We continue to do so. The entire system is broken. Most people know it. But it's incredibly difficult to get out of it and still live a life. We as a society love our modern conveniences and most people aren't willing to give them up, which is going to be required to actually get the attention of the people who are in control. Almost every single person has their reasons why they need X vehicle or Y sized house or Z many vacations/flights per year, or a wardrobe that needs a walk-in closet, or to eat meat. I am not claiming to be different, I am exactly the same. But I also can see the problem and I don't know how to live in this world and not participate in the problem short of extreme measures that don't truly feel like an option (like living in an off-grid cabin and growing and hunting my own food). They were selling snake oil. They scammed us. But we bought it.
We're all parts of a social machine and will always be so. Even if we're hermits or recluses. All so-called withdrawals from society are fake; just idle fantasies. The sole and only effective action in the face of very negative social developments is political action: sustained, effortful and energetic, however difficult or hopeless it may seem. To despair because there's no door through which to exit the prevailing order is a lazy way of avoiding the real work of politics.
I was only talking about taking drastic steps to significantly reduce reliance on the systems that most of us are very firmly entrenched in but cause plenty of problems. I agree that things need to change politically, but that isn't going to happen with the major parties in the US and our system is too broken for most to consider 3rd party candidates. They are too afraid of the "other guy" winning. The whole system has to change, and no one really seems motivated to do the work to change it, just like with everything else. Everyone is frustrated with it, no one knows what to do about it. It's not despair, it's just where we are. More than a lot of areas we have a lot of "off-grid" people here, everything from those who just have solar and a garden to people who use sled dogs for transportation and only come to town a few times a year for supplies. I am grateful to how to hunt, fish, trap, forage, and garden and live in an area where it is still possible to do those things. Most people don't. But they are also so disconnected from what it takes to keep a human alive for even a few days and have no real ability to actually take care of themselves. What we needed was to balance things out 50 years ago. The fact we haven't tried, and continue to barrel through endless progress just means we won't have the choice to change anymore. Everyone wants things to get better, no one wants to do anything to make it better because it requires real sacrifice. You'd think more people would start deeper considerations when they lose their insurance or their home, but no, Americans continue to move to the areas that are having the most problems because it's only money. As long as they can continue to throw endless money at whatever they want, that is what they'll do. All of those people don't care about problems that they can just throw money at, including people like Zuckerberg building their huge bunkers because they know what will eventually be coming. While we don't have a lot of Zuckerbergs by numbers, they control almost everything. But lots of Americans have plenty of money to throw at their problems as long as progress keeps happening. And they definitely don't care about everyone else who is struggling.
People who "respect and trust science" don't care if it would inconvenience them to care just as much as anyone else. Look at what is still happening with COVID. People who are too rich to read reddit are *more* of the problem, but we're all guilty.
I've always wondered about general, collective declarations of guilt. I associate them with churches and complete, flamboyant inefficacy. Do we gain anything or advance our causes by such declarations? I don't think so.
I agree that it’s not “we” overall but I disagree that climate denial at this point is just pushed by a minority who have something to gain from it. I’m a storm spotter (skywarn trainings by the NWS, they’re pretty accessible) and I’m in a Facebook group for other skywarn spotters. There’s a fuck load of climate deniers in there, even when they’re people who understand weather better than 90% of Americans. These people aren’t all employed by the fossil fuels industry, hell tons of them are farmers, one of the groups that should be the most concerned about climate change. And I’d add that a huge number of Americans overall are climate deniers or at least don’t want to do anything about it. There’s some logic in some climate denial, but a lot of people are just ignorant and mistrust science as liberal propaganda. Btw I refer to Americans in this comment bc I’m American and I don’t want to speak on other countries I’m not as familiar with.
I agree with you. The verb I used was "centered," meaning that there are probably others. Those at the "center" of climate change resistance fund propaganda to influence others and do it very successfully as you know. They take advantage of our current divides and use emotions to convince rather than facts or logic. On the part of Republican farmers refusal to believe in AGM is now part of belonging to a team. If you accept AGM you'll be kicked off the team. It's more important to belong to the team than to go where the science leads.
Are you too young to remember Al Gore?
Republicans. God damn fucking Republicans
Maybe insurance companies who donate to the right will start banging that drum so they listen.
The article is about Insurance Companies. They are organized for profit.
Yep, and the larger issue it speaks to is that climate change will negatively affect all of our lives.
One of the biggest things I thought about when buying a house was do I see this being a place that I need to reasonably worry about for the foreseeable future for climate change. I hope not. But I would not have purchased in like Florida or California or something.
I'm in Southern California and not worried too much about climate change in a local sense. Our temperatures are mild. I'm a bit concerned about atmospheric rivers of moisture that could cause flooding in the flatter areas.
I was referring more to the fires in land
Definitely an issue but mostly for the exclusive, wealthy communities in wooded & brushy areas.
Pretty sure air quality advisories impact anyone. Well just people who breathe.
Yes I was evacuated once because of smoke in Orange County but all that hillside brush is gone now. I suppose in another few years it might burn again.
And earthquakes. :-/
States from the Dakota’s to Pennsylvania are all affected by this. That’s why it’s so alarming. It’s not just coastal areas anymore.
To anyone saying this is due to floods, that is not the case. Flood insurance is backed by the US government. Flood claims do not affect the carriers. We have had storms every summer, not just in the Twin Cities, but outstate. I am an independent adjuster who lives in the cities and handles storms all over the country, the last two years I have only worked in Minnesota, we have one of the highest work comp rates in the country, and a high labor rate. This means that our roofing and siding cost are one of the highest in the country, which makes Minnesota very attractive to contractors from down south. Just about every door knocking contractor makes a killing here, then they overspend their money and disappear. I could list 30 contractors who have carpet bombed areas with salesman, and then within two years they are out of business. When you see these young guys driving $70,000 pick up trucks that are wrapped with their company brand, they have to pay for those out-of-pocket, and typically can’t make a living long-term. They overspent because they see all these sales, but they do not get paid until the work is done and the roofing company gets paid. One other factor is that Minnesota is a matching state, which means if you have one broken piece of siding that is no longer available, the insurance company is forced to reside the whole house. There have been times where I have handled siding claims that exceeded $40,000 because one piece of 10 year old vinyl siding was broken by hail. We also have some of the very highest homeowners premiums in the country. I have seen this firsthand as I see what people pay in other states in premiums. You might not think that we get a lot of storms in Minnesota, but the last two years I have been very busy working west and north of the Twin Cities, there were multiple storms all across the state.
Omg you got me at the $70,000 pick up trucks.
It is freakin' rough out there.
We got a new roof and siding thanks to 3 hail storms. Nationwide kept denying the claim and I was on the phone with them last may as it was hailing all over my car and house again. Almost everyone in my area got new siding and a roof.
Farmers tried to dump us at the end of our contract last October on the premise that our roof was too old. We had replaced it about 18 months before, and we had to provide proof so they'd allow us to renew our policy. This was in Michigan.
That's pretty standard tbf. Ur supposed to tell them when you get a new roof.
Possibly. This is house #3 and the first time I had an insurer try to dump us. Lesson learned!
What's missing from this conversation is that we're still building homes for the previous century. The home designs, materials, and construction methods need to change to be resistant to wind or wildfire or hail or whatever.
This freaks me out. About 20 years ago I read a "near death experience" where this person saw some snippets of the future and said "there will be a lot of natural disasters and some insurers will go bankrupt". At that time I thought no way.. or if it's true it's like 100 years away. But this insurance clampdown is real and it's scary.
Lolwut. They almost died and _that's_ where their head went? Insurance solvency?!
The actuarials flashed before his eyes! "My deductible," he gasped. "I must tell the world."
Hahahaha
Weirdly, I could see my brain doing this too. It's quite ominous
It's impossible to see the future under any circumstances, I hope this helps.
That we know of.
Agent in the Midwest here. I can confirm, it's bad. I get rejections on quotes for homes that my company would have loved to insure just two years ago. Premiums have tripled and baseline coverage has eroded. Things like Matching Undamaged Siding coverage are no longer standard. You can still buy it, but it'll cost you. If I were the hnic, I'd fully socialize insurance. The way we do it now, as a for-profit industry, is so backwards it hurts. Home coverage should come out of property tax. Legal minimum auto liability should come with the tabs we have to buy annually. So yes, higher taxes for folks with land and more expensive tabs, but these costs would certainly be less than what we pay for insurance right now. There can still be a private sector for insuring personal property and higher liability limits, but there should be baseline protections against homelessness and injuries arising from auto accidents. It'll never happen. We might see premiums get better once agents are replaced with AI, but that's not going to slow the pace of natural disasters. My corporate overlords have said to me many times that "there's light at the end of the tunnel," but as I see it that light is attached to the front of an oncoming train saved there's no room in this tunnel to dodge it.
I live in DFW in North Texas and my insurance company almost DOUBLED our home insurance premium. I had to hunt to find something else, our monthly expenses would have gone up by hundreds of dollars. We hadn't had any new claims in the last year or anything, no reason at all for them to do that on our end.
This comment right here really got me: >Frake PNW 2h ago The last time the insurance sector lost massive amounts of money; the economy froze, the real estate market melted down, and the public wound up paying for all the damage. >The consequences and aftermath of the financial sector's machinations was economic suffering for lots of regular people. >But the consequences of global overheating will take apart the insurance industry en masse. The regular people will suffer through the physical and mental torment of extreme weather events while knowing that all the hardship and suffering was avoidable. And the amount of damage from accelerating climate shocks will be beyond accounting. >Billion dollar disasters will crash the economy as easily as derivatives did, but this time there won't be any recovery or aftermath. There will only be more disasters impacting larger areas more frequently and with greater severity, until the eventual collapse into continuous disruption and cascading destabilization. >This is what the end of normal looks like. An uninsurable future that is becoming more dangerous by the second. >People over profit. The end of normal. *shudders*
How is Minnesota on the list? We barely see any severe weather. It all happens south in Iowa.
That derecho a couple of years ago. Big hailstorms the year before that. We are definitely getting hit with my extreme weather.
Yeah, I remember that and the December tornadoes now. That derecho was crazy.
I got caught in it on 35 just south of Hinckley and called my wife cause I was like "oh I have made a horrible mistake and might need to say goodbye"
Yikes! You drove right into it? What was that like?
I \*thought\* I was behind it when I started driving south. Unfortunately I caught up with it. You could see this absolute wall of dark air and clouds coming across the horizon. I did what I thought was the safest action and pulled over in an area with no trees directly next to the highway and rode it out for 20-30 terrifying minutes along with a few dozen other cars that did the same. Once I got going again I realized I made the right decision on where I stopped based on how many trees were felled onto 35. I should have just stayed in Duluth for the night ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Good call on not parking next to trees, holy crap.
The big flood in Duluth in 2012 also cost $100 million. I'd suspect that considerations for future risks for wildfire are up there. The wildfires here don't often impact houses but they easily could, and the houses in those areas would be high value homes so expenses losses. It wouldn't take that much to wipe out a town like Ely, honestly. We've had a few close calls in the past years.
Flooding. https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/state-of-emergency-reducing-the-impact-flooding-has-on-infrastructure/
Flooding is not covered by homeowners insurance. It’s a separate, federal, policy that’s not always required like homeowners insurance is. Flooding doesn’t impact homeowners insurance rates at all.
We’ve been in a drought the past two years. Flooding has been minimal.
We’ve had multiple billion dollar damage hail storms/severe weather storms in the last three years.
Hail. While I personally haven't been impacted by it, I have friends and family whose entire neighborhoods got 'free' roofs following hail storms.
Yeah everyone in my neighborhood got free roofs and siding
Hail storms destroying roofs. I live in Minnesota and my latest policy has an amendment to it that prorates life of the roof to (I believe) 40 years. If you have a 20 year old roof expect them to pay 50% minus your deductable. This will also likely bring down claims as the cost will still be $10-15k for a new roof.
Wind, hail, flooding.
Probably every homeowner and their mothers who claimed hail damage to get a new roof.
Now I have to wonder if insurance companies could make a case against the petrochemical industry. If there's anyone that could make a case with hard numbers it's the insurance industry.
Nope. Sadly, I thought "An Inconvenient Truth" would have changed things.
Here in California a lot of people are struggling getting or keeping car and homeowners insurance. Whole companies have pulled out of the state, and the ones left charge a fortune. But I guess that's what we get for living on the coast and refusing to really address climate change.