Paying for Driving

maxmautner.com

18 points·mslate··3 comments

I don't understand. If I injure somebody with my car, doesn't my insurance pay the cost? Or is this cost for what the bill is minus my coverage?

There is some double counting, and you can size it: NHTSA priced US crashes in 2019 at $340B in actual bills: medical, lost wages, property damage, legal. Private insurers paid ~54% of that, so call it $185B.

But the bills are the small part. Count the deaths and the permanent injuries themselves and NHTSA's total estimated annual cost from crashes in the US is $1.4T. So insurance covers ~13% of the harm. The other trillion has no payer. Taxpayers pick up $30B of it, about $230 per household, and the rest lands on whoever got killed or disabled.

Minimum bodily injury liability runs $25,000-$30,000 per person in most states. That's the check amount that gets written when someone dies (if one gets written at all!).

If victims of traffic were made whole then car insurance would be staggeringly expensive and either (1) only extremely rich people would afford to drive or (2) a ton of un-insured drivers would be out on the roads.

> If victims of traffic were made whole then car insurance would be staggeringly expensive and either (1) only extremely rich people would afford to drive or (2) a ton of un-insured drivers would be out on the roads.

This seems like kinda of am extreme prediction. The EU sets much, much higher liability limits and neither (1) nor (2) is true. A gradual roll out would give time for driving habbits and infrastructure to absorb the changes.

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