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plant-ianyesterday at 2:42 AM1 replyview on HN

Article seems a bit black and white. After fire insurance dumped my mother's insurance, the "Fair" Plan started out with some similar black and white with insights like "zipcode bad for fire" == "you get worst price". Recently their direction has gotten better, better clearance == better pricing, better building == better pricing, etc. This seems like a better direction. Monthly inspections maybe even == better pricing. Repairs == better pricing. Community changes == better pricing. I think there is a lot of gradual room for improvement here. Ie. More spacing between homes, yard clearance, hydrant locations, accessible fire water sources, quarterly inspections by qualified inspectors, etc. Maybe highly exposed communities would have 10,000 gallon water tanks every square block just for fire.

I think it is easy for people to "dump" on some of these higher priced real estate incidents seen recently but this is also affecting people on social security. What are we going to do just let their house burn down and then just have a bunch of homeless senior citizens in the mix. Why even have government? Seems like a terrible country to live in if a 30 year old needs to plan their house situation out into their 80s.

Also seems a bit ironic to me that you get insurance to cover unexpected future expenses but when insurance takes losses then they can just drop you because .. the losses were unexpected. They've known for 20++ years and I'm sure some... money was made... Did they put some away for this situation? Also if you personally experience a loss they also drop you almost immediately.

This idea that we'd just let insurance companies do whatever is *nuts*. Has that ever worked? Honestly pure capitalism seems like the real behind the scenes American dream or fantasy. This same climate change most likely was created by companies making buckets of money with no plan to deal with the side-effects we experience now. Just let the market take care of it....

These companies aren't about making "some profit" they want to make as much profit as possible. Is some 75 year widow living in her and her dead husband's house in Eureka, CA going to convince them to keep insuring her house at a reasonable price? Even if she paid the same insurance company for 30 years?

I think the solution is going to require some government intervention because insurance companies just don't care and it will be hard for new players to innovate quickly enough to tackle such a large crisis. Ie. legislating the inspections, legislating the fire-resistant building guidelines + insurance scale, subsidizing certain low income locations, working with communities to improve fire safety and resources. Some work has happened but clearly it is not happening fast enough.


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