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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Fuck Cars
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Car insurance is expensive because cars are both risky and highly destructive. Hence, making a market for them involves high prices.
Regardless of what you think of insurance companies, there's just no way around this - you could nationalize car insurance and it would still either be really expensive, either on the policy level or else born by taxes.
Certainly not. I just put in some data in an insurance broker thingy and I would be able to get insurance for approx. 120€/month with partially comprehensive coverage (including obligatory liability insurance). These outrageous prices are definitely a US thing.
The U.S is different in that car insurance has to cover medical expenses for others when you are at fault, combined with the risk of driving quite frankly being higher in the U.S. With medical costs being extremely high in the U.S, prices follow that fact.
I'm not trying to argue against the fact that they are both risky and highly destructive, it is definitely necessary. My issue is more with the way that it works in the UK. I think the system in somewhere like Australia is a lot fairer and isnt inherently designed to bleed people of the maximum amount of money like it is in the UK.
Stop throating the boot of exploitive companies.
They're not, they're complaining about the problems inherent to cars.
Which is ignoring the problems inherant to auto insurance, which is fundamentally a greater force in the price/cost of car insurance than the danger of cars.
Yes, cars can be dangerous, but that's not why car insurance is expensive, it's expensive because car insurance companies have a completely captive market in the US- one that must pay whatever the insurance comapny dictates.
As a result, they set the price as high as they can get away with, and then refuse to actually pay it out anyway.
Don't make excuses for the insurance companies. The risk is the whole point, and certainly does not excuse their gouging.
You'll notice other countries do not, in fact, have to deal with this level of price gouging, which implies it's nothing to do with the cars themselves- it's just the insurance companies, and it always has been.
The risk is the point though. High risk activities will cost more to insure because they'll need to be paid out more often. Couple that with the high destruction possible, and you have frequent accidents that can all cause very expensive damage, necessitating a high base price for insurance.
The price gouging is just capitalism, and I doubt anyone here is going to argue that capitalism isn't bad.