[woah]

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.

[bombcar]

The danger of the areas has not been properly accounted for, and now that we have a better understanding, nobody wants to pay what it actually costs (either in increased insurance, which apparently CA has limited, or building design changes - knock down the flammable one and build something impervious, or even abandoning untenable locations - perhaps after disaster, perhaps before).

Everyone's talking about fire insurance, but the earthquake insurance question is even bigger and basically untenable in a worst-case scenario. So in that case, CA wised up and the state is much more earthquake resilient than it was 30 years ago.