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by robbmorganf 1707 days ago
Sometimes I wonder why we pay for insurance (to cover unpredictable accidents) when insurance policies specifically don't cover many unpredictable accidents...
3 comments

You don't insurance to protect the car, you get insurance to protect yourself, i.e., liability.

If you do an oopsy, and someone dies or even ends up in a wheelchair, how are you going to pay for the resulting lawsuit otherwise? Covering repairs is just an added bonus on top of the CYA.

Also consider if you end up in a wheelchair or quadriplegic: what happens if the person who hit you is a deadbeat driving around without insurance? Do you think you'll be able to extract anything out of them with a standard lawsuit?

Do you have general life insurance with critical illness coverage? Do you have any kind of income replacement policy?

* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01041...

In many jurisdictions (e.g. the USA) coverage against theft and damage is separate and can be omitted. Liability insurance is usually mandatory by law. So I think people tend to view them as separate and different to some extent.
>You don't insurance to protect the car, you get insurance to protect yourself, i.e., liability.

More to the point, your (liability) car insurance is to protect the other person

Your (liability) car insurance is to protect your financial situation by paying the other person.
Because it covers a lot of other accidents that are predictable.
If it's predictable it's an (expensive) pre-payment plan. Perhaps you mean it's characterizable.
Predictable yet unlikely events (especially expensive) are what insurance is optimally for.
Exactly. It's unlikely to happen to you personally, but it's certain to happen to some proportion of the whole population in a given time period. That's what makes meteorites different - they're unlikely to happen even to the population as a whole.
So it makes perfect sense to cover them.

There has been (one, perhaps two?) cases of damage to car by meteorite in the last decade, in the same period there have been billions of insurance policies issued. The per insurance policy cost is negligible.

Not necessarily. My home insurance (with outdoor coverage) has an add-on policy that also covers damage away from the house up to €3000 per event, for €12 a month with a €100 deductible.

That means I don’t need any separate insurance for my laptop, phone, headphones, watch, what have you. And if just one of those breaks in the span of 3 years, I’ve already broken even at worst, or a net €2570 ‘gain’ at best.

I need to rewatch the film The Man Who Sued God, which tackles this particular thing (I believe it was based on a real story?). The tl;dr is, a guy's boat was hit by lightning and the insurance didn't pay out because it was "Act of God", or in more agnostic terms, unpredictable / unexpected.
Interesting, I saw a Bollywood film with that premise - can't recall the name but I think more recent - not a boat, but the guy's shop. Was good from what I recall, would also recommend.

(edit: though in hindsight I realise that's a useless 'recommendation' if I can't recall the name...)

That's the one, thanks!