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Comment by 911e | Hacker News Reader

This is quite interesting, I feel like at some point we need to cut those middleman that bail out as soon as paying is involved

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They aren't in business to give away money. Insurance is all about paying to mitigate risk. If the risk of loss increases or becomes too hard to predict, insurance will get more expensive or simply not be offered.

There's no inherent reason it must be a profit-making business. Organizeing as a cooperative, mutual insurance is also an option. Granted that any version still must set rates that cover expected payouts.

> no inherent reason it must be a profit-making business

Insurance is an extremely demanding business. This isn’t something you can throw commodity drones at. If you’re willing to create a coöperative job that pays millions to its actuaries and risk managers, fine. Most don’t. Hence why a profit-based model works: it can incentivise the people that are needed for it to work in the long run to do the job. (In the short run, anyone can run a sloppy insurance operation.)

One interesting experiment in this area is the Canadian Province of Saskatchewan, where the government has run a break even auto and property insurance organization since 1945. It does not receive money from the tax payers and is completely self sustaining:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_Government_Insura...

Aside from being non-profit, an additional benefit that makes this model more cost effective is that you don't have insurance companies suing each other because everyone has the same insurance company.

You’re describing government. People cooperate through government to insure stability.

I will never understand the endless linguistic indirection when in the end it’s all Soylent Green; just people.

Are you saying that whenever people cooperate voluntarily, it's a government?

Mutual insurance companies exist, presumably they are also bailing in places where the cost is unsustainable.

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