Hacker News Reader

Comment by temporallobe | Hacker News Reader

Car insurance rates in FL are among the highest in the nation and my rates keep going up. One of the drivers to this (no pun intended) is that so many motorists here are uninsured or underinsured (and many are not even licensed), as we are only required to carry $10k in Personal Injury Protection and $10k in Property Damage Liability, and many people carry just that. It’s also a “no-fault” state, which for simple fender-benders works pretty ok, but for more serious accidents can get very complicated and costly. It’s why we have so many personal injury attorneys and our cities are saturated with billboards shouting things like “DAN NEWLIN GOT ME $800,000”.

View on HN

> One of the drivers to this (no pun intended) is that so many motorists here are uninsured or underinsured (and many are not even licensed), as we are only required to carry $10k in Personal Injury Protection and $10k in Property Damage Liability, and many people carry just that.

This could drive up the price of full coverage (i.e. uninsured/underinsured motorist insurance), but you're not required to buy that. In principle it should also reduce the moral hazard of insurance -- if people have less insurance then they have to be more careful about causing damage because if they do it comes out of their own pocket instead of the insurance company's, or puts them at risk of being charged with a hit and run if they flee.

The actual problem is that too many people don't own anything anymore, because otherwise they would want to carry insurance to protect their assets. Leave too many people poor and desperate and you can see what happens.

What is the police doing? Uninsured motorists are illegal. They could perform routine traffic stops, ask the motorist to produce insurance, and if they don't have insurance send them straight to jail. Get these people off the roads.

It should be easy for people to grok that by having a large number of uninsured motorists on the road, their own insurance premiums are increasing. Thus, people should be petitioning the police to catch more uninsured motorists. Why isn't that happening?

Florida is a lawless dystopia. I still get pushback when I say this, but after living a good 25 years here and also 6 years in California for comparison's sake, I feel I've earned the right to make the pronouncement. Police basically do not do anything useful here.

Are you implying the police are active in California? Isn't theft insane there right now because of the lack of policing?

They are pretty useless there too. California is also a lawless dystopia in many ways.

These days automatic license plate readers can trivially be wired up to insurance databases. A cop car can just automatically know who is insured and who isn't just watching the traffic go. But it's hard enough to convince cops to pull over people with obviously bogus or expired paper tags.

Imagine simping for more surveillance.

I'm just acknowledging the technology is already there and often already installed. If they're going to surveil me they might as well actually do something useful and get uninsured motorists off the road.

Drag racing on the highway

https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/investigation-cops-regula...

But they don't need to do insurance spot checks - in my state they run plates of cars that are in view and, presumably, they are alerted if you don't have insurance.

We have a whole grifter-industrial complex built around milking your own $10k PIP for any little thing that happens.

I was hit by an incompetent driver and burned through $40K in medical expenses of the $50K mandatory PIP in my state. It is a nice thing to have when it's needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com