Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Insurance is about distributing risk. Instead of e.g. 2% of people taking a 100% loss, 100% of people take a 2% loss. Since a guaranteed 2% loss is way more palatable to many people than a chance of a 100% loss, this works out well for many people.

It's not "hubris", it's simple economics. If you don't like it, you don't have to take it, of course. You're allowed to take the option of being forced to live on the streets if you suffer an injury that makes you unable to work for a living. But don't think that other people are somehow deranged for disagreeing.

View on HN

I never said that I consider my view objectively correct or superior... and never intended to imply that a contrary view would be deranged! Far from it; I explicitly recognised that mine was probably a minority view.

However the submission implicitly assumes that this option is right for everyone ("The one HR benefit that every startup should add"). I recognise that some people see it as valuable. Hopefully those people can also recognise that other people don't!

I also think the strawman of "Take disability insurance or live on the streets" is rather hyperbolic. The actual alternative is relying on social security disability payments and my existing savings vs an insurance-funded pension. Maybe I'll have to let my chauffeur go, but I'm hardly going to be sleeping in gutters if I take the former option.

My wife's working through the social security disability process, and it's not something you can rely on for months if not years (assuming your appeal of the nearly guaranteed initial denial even works!). If she had been our family's single income we'd be destitute.

That sucks... sorry to hear it.

My country doesn't seem to have implemented the blanket-denial first stage of the process yet, however luckily I have savings which could tide me over until the payments get backdated in that eventuality.

Sorry, when I saw you describe taking the insurance as "hubris", that looked to me like a value judgment.

> If you don't like it, you don't have to take it, of course.

Unless you live in a country that funds such programs via taxation, which is most (all?) Western democracies.

Sigh, I should have known I'd get a reply like this.

The conversation is about commercial, private insurance plans, not about government social security systems. That is what the "it" refers to. You are talking about something completely different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com