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by jb1991 684 days ago
I’m frankly surprised this is legal. I can’t imagine something like this passing in the EU.
2 comments

Compared to the EU, the ostensibly relies more on litigation and less on regulation to keep things in check. This has, in turn, led to a more permissive attitude where, in general, anything goes unless and until people can successfully sue over it. Which, in turn, doesn't happen because we have a thing called forced arbitration that prevents most consumers from suing over most things - instead they have to go to an "arbitrator" who is chosen and paid for by the corporation in question, and therefore extremely highly motivated to not decide cases in a way that might cause their client to take their business elsewhere.

And, thanks to our darn near unrestricted version of free speech and a Supreme Court ruling that tore down most restrictions on political lobbying by ruling that spending money also counts as a form of speech, corporations spend an obscene amount of money on getting buddy-buddy with legislators. So the legislatures also tend to be incredibly slow to act on these kinds of things because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them, either.

The sounds incredibly like a version of hell.
I think the details around this vary a lot from country to country. I work for a Norwegian insurer, and I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t cancel a contract like this short of something like fraud. OTOH, contracts are renewed annually, and I think declining to renew would be an option. But damages due to lack of maintenance are not covered anyways, so I’m not sure if there’s much incentive for this kind of thing in our market.
Damages due to lack of maintenance are not covered and you don't see the local application?
I’m not convinced it’s cheaper to surveil the entire country than to simply assess claims when they are reported and dismiss those that are due to lack of maintenance.