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Comment by dougk16 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I fully grasp your argument, but if health insurance becomes anything like car insurance, then at best it's just a slightly lesser evil. I've been paying car insurance for about 15 years, at $120 a month, which is about $21,600 paid in so far, and I haven't used it once. The one time I got into a minor fender bender, I just gave the guy some cash and parted ways. If I reported it, then my rates would go up and the insurance company would eventually make back whatever they paid out anyway. Over my lifetime, I'll have given them perhaps upwards of $100,000...for what? It's not worth it to pay so much to have peace of mind against some hypothetical horrible accident.

I would much rather a more government-backed system, where the government tallies all the automobile-related accident costs at the end of the year and foots the public the bill.

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Basic liability insurance (for auto) is more like $500 a year. That's more or less the mandated part of the coverage.

I don't really care to see the government insure expensive cars and the assets of the wealthy (expensive cars and asset protection are the big drivers of expensive insurance).

$500 * 50 years is still $25,000 over a lifetime. I feel safe in saying that that number doesn't come anywhere close to the damages that an average person actually causes. And besides, I paid about that much when living in the midwest for a stint, but around an east coast city you'll be lucky to get that price for half a year.

My master plan could similarly relate population density to accountability.

You have a good point about "luxury" assets (and certainly there would be many special cases like this to account for), but I'm not really talking about government insurance per se, because it's based on actual damages. If no car accidents happened in a year, nobody would pay any money.

I have more than the legal minimum of liability insurance, live in an East coast state and pay less than $600 year. I do have a fairly clear record.

People that carry collision are doing so because someone made it a condition of a loan or because they are worried about the cost of losing a vehicle. I don't see any reason to bring the government into those situations.

Fair enough. I ran an orange light a few years ago and my insurance costs went up by 150%. While the $500/year price tag may be what's on paper, I find that it isn't the reality for most people.

It isn't so much bringing the government in, as just using them as the non-profit middle man to tally all the car-related damage costs, then foot the bill to the public. If someone wanted to opt out and use private insurance, they would be free to do so.

Obviously this will never happen in the USA, but it would be an interesting social experiment for a smaller country perhaps.

> I would much rather a more government-backed system, where the government tallies all the automobile-related accident costs at the end of the year and foots the public the bill.

This is pure Moral Hazard. If any cost you may incur is diluted over a pool of over 100,000,000 other people what do you care that you smash up someone elses car? Every $1,000,000 of damage costs you less than a penny. And if you put your car in a ditch the government (read: other people) will buy you a new one and you don't pay a dime...

The same risks exist with the system in place now (insurance fraud), and will exist with really any system. The mechanisms for mitigating these risks seem rather obvious. If someone runs their car into a ditch, you do some reasonable investigation to see if it was legitimate. If someone continuously gets into suspicious accidents, they're on their own and have to pay private insurance or stop driving.

Edit: not to mention the health risks of purposely smashing up your car :)

In some states you can self-insure your car if you have the cash.

Awesome...didn't know that! Self-insurance seems like a reasonable compromise to what I'm talking about.

It's a great option so long as you are comfortable having ca. $50,000 of your own money on the line every time you get behind the wheel.

I'm in no way willing to make that wager though...

With the current system, you're not even wagering that $50,000...you're throwing it out the window. Unless you believe you'll cause >= $50,000 of car-related damage over your lifetime.

Also, and this is the bigger piece of having auto insurance vs being self-insured, if you hit somebody else and kill them, you may be in for a wrongful death suit and personally liable for all of those expenses, or even medical bills if the person survives it. Those bills can easily jump into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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