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Comment by Swenrekcah | Hacker News Reader

Surprised (or perhaps not) to learn that cars can be self-insured in the USA. Where I’m from, the main objective of mandatory car insurance is to pay for the life of the people you might kill or seruously injure. Thst can be a considerable amount that I’m not sure anyone would be eager to pay out themselves, even if they’ve got the funds.

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The compulsory insurance limits in most states are laughably/ludicrously low. In MA, I have to carry $40K bodily injury liability, and $5K property liability.

Literally, I could be responsible for an accident that totals a 15 year old car and gives the driver an ambulance ride and a couple day hospital stay and have my compulsory insurance not be enough to cover the entire liability.

Of course, nearly everyone carries a substantial (10-50x) multiple of the compulsory minimums in auto-specific liability policies, and if you have any amount of wealth accumulated, it's common to have an additional umbrella policy.

[0]-https://usinsuranceagents.com/massachusetts-car-insurance-re...

Like, it doesn't make sense. My insurance policy is about $600/year and covers up to 25 million(!!!) euro in 3rd party damages. Like, I'd need to crash into several Bugatti Chirons or a plane to actually exhaust my policy.

I guess the reason why US allows it is because the society is so litigious - if you have that amount of money to self insure you also have enough money to fight pretty much any claim against you.

> My insurance policy is about $600/year and covers up to 25 million(!!!) euro in 3rd party damages. Like, I'd need to crash into several Bugatti Chirons or a plane to actually exhaust my policy.

Or one crash where you injure someone so bad that they cannot work anymore for the rest of their life, maybe need specialized support and so on. The damages in property are usually the least important part of a car crash.

It adds up really fast, especially when deaths or disabilities (even worth from a financial perspective) are the result of the crash.

Apparently it is a problem in China as well.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/09/why-drivers-in-c...

> Like, I'd need to crash into several Bugatti Chirons or a plane to actually exhaust my policy.

Or injure a single person to an extent that requires lifelong fulltime medical care.

You can’t typically self-insure the liability portion, because you are playing with other people’s money. You can choose not to buy collision insurance, which would cover damage to your own vehicle. Even then, you can only do that if you own the vehicle free and clear.

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