> Public insurance. For housing

This is California’s FAIR plan [1]. It’s a wealth transfer from non-homeowners to homeowners, homeowners in low-risk areas to high-risk homeowners, and from low-value homeowners to rich ones.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_FAIR_Plan

Isn't this thing going to be subsidized by taxpayers in the end anyway?

California already a dumb communal insurance thing, the "California FAIR Plan" for people who can't get insurance due to high risk. They force insurance companies who operate in the state to fund it. So basically everyone has to subsidize the high-risk people... but then the insurance companies leave.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-fair-pl...

As a British citizen by birth, I'm amused by the idea that Americans may get National Insurance for houses before they do for healthcare.

Public insurance would provide no benefit. The issue in California is that people have built their houses in dangerous areas and have not taken any measures to reduce fire risk. The state has already set limits to how much insurance costs can be increased (from a past generation of economic illiterates who wanted to stop "middlemen siphoning value"). Therefore, insurance companies are just pulling out, which disproves the entire idea that they are "siphoning value", since obviously there is no value there to siphon.

The only thing that public insurance would do is to provide a way for the state to incur another massive unfunded liability. Except, unlike healthcare or pensions which have the somewhat laudable goal of taking care of poor people and old people, this would go to bailing out rich homeowners who made a bad investment of a house in a flammable area and then refused to spend money on fire safety measures, either in their home or their municipality.

Of course these fire zone bag holders are now clamoring for the state to take on their bad investments by pushing conspiracy theories about the evil insurance companies.

> Public insurance.

That only guarantees you have insurance. It does not guarantee that you will be covered or made whole in an incident or emergency.

See FL Citizen's insurance and other insurances of last resort as examples.

What really needs to happen is premiums go up with the cost of risk. But this also means pricing people out of homes, vehicles, businesses, etc. And no politician will allow this.

Not sure I agree with housing insurance as a public service… we do want to expose some risk to drive behavioral changes. People really shouldn’t be building houses in low lying areas near the shoreline in Florida. But if there’s no risk because it’s covered by other tax payers, then they will.

It does seem like it's time to stop letting this "industry" profit off the misfortune of its customers. Making all of these a public service instead of private industry makes sense at this point.