Killing with a car costs $1.6M, California requires drivers to carry $30K
maxmautner.comMaking cars a requirement for participating in society, across all socioeconomic levels, was a mistake. Now, lacking a car can put people into economic crisis.
We can correct this by investing in public transportation and getting rid of government-provided free parking.
I agree, plus we need to make public transit safer and cleaner (I live in Los Angeles and love the metro, but it can be edgy).
Its not juat investment, *ts rules overhaul to make the regulatory burden of development of public transit as small as possible because that is mostly what is screwing up inv#sting in public transport
In the US. Rest of the world has functioning public transport.
Cyprus, a member of EU, barely has any public transport.
If people can’t afford to pay for an accident then they should not be driving
If people want to die in a ditch they should not be driving. Americans have to drive to get money and have to get money to eat.
It's better to use the term "collision" as "accident" is loaded and implies that no-one is at fault or to blame. There's a long history of car industry bodies changing the narrative around traffic collisions in reporting (e.g. use of passive voice and not mentioning a driver).
It was not a mistake, it was done deliberately.
There is a program in California that offers even lower limits...
The California Low Cost Auto Insurance (CLCA) program provides liability coverage limits of up to $10,000 for bodily injury or death per person, $20,000 per accident, and $3,000 for property damage. This program is designed to help income-eligible residents afford basic auto insurance.
You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.
> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever
Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)?
Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog:
Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered.
I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.
You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).
Note that many countries who have socialised healthcare and/or accident compensation also collect taxes or levies for higher risk activities as part of the base to pay for it all.
For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance.
The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group?
The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.
If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.
Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.
You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
So why is someone who is not an employer, subsiding other employers in their purchase of employee insurance?
What does that even mean? The insurance is for the person who gets a hand cut off in an industrial accident. It's not for the employer.
So it is the employer who has to pay for it, not other citizens.
Who pays is not that simple.
The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.
So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.
So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.
But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.
So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.
So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
Did you know that you could charge people different rates for insurance based on risk profiles or deny them outright? You used to be able to anyway.
I’m fine subsidizing people of a similar risk profile that have a hit by a bus moment. I’m not fine subsidizing the obese and chronically ill.
That makes you very out of step with most Americans. You choose to pick on the obese because it’s more socially acceptable, but also people with cancer, kidney disease, etc.
Your position would be considered deeply immoral by most people (rightly). Maybe spend less time on-line and interact with regular people.
Everyone benefits from a universal accident coverage scheme.
Who pays for that?
Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
Politicians of the past?
We're on track for an annual deficit that exceeds everything but the 2020/2021 covid era. The politicians of the present are the issue.
It turns out that even broad consumption taxes in the guise of tariffs aren't enough to offset gigantic permanent tax breaks for the wealthiest.
And the current politicians. 2.2T just this year, unbelievable.
> The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
Between his first term and his second term to date (2+ more years), Trump is responsible for more that one quarter (29%) of US debt (USD 11.6T / 40T):
* https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide...
There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.
It doesn't help that literally every medical procedure in America is automatically 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world.
And any US hospital administrator will pump that injured foreigner for all he or she's worth. At least the quality of care is decent.
Wouldn't the insurance company's incentive be to sell you the most coverage they can?
Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.
Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
“Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area.
> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.
“Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency.
Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.
Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
The reforms that were passed a few years ago are actually working somewhat OK. I'm 3 miles from the beach on the coast and pay under $2k for private home owners insurance.
Yet at the same time federal government allowed home insurance to be non-actuarial (aka insolvent) for natural disasters like hurricanes. So essentially the rest of the country subsidise residents in disaster-prone areas. So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.
>So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.
More like some the people in Ohio or Maine or Wisconsin pays for both. CA and FL are both natural disaster dense compared to the colder states.
Yes even better. Parent just compared insurance cost in CA vs FL, so I brought CA here.
PS: California, not cyanoacrylate.
Uh, what's the transmission mechanism for this?
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
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In Sweden if you register a car and have no insurance you're automatically on the governments but it's 3x more expensive than normal.
Most US states require proof of insurance to register a car. Some people just cancel their insurance after registration, and others simply don’t register it.
That is tiny. I just checked Uk legislation and it seems to require £1.2m cover for damage to property and unlimited cover for personal injury and deaths.
I have $500,000 in coverage for bodily injury liability and $100,000 for property damage and I feel like that’s not enough but those are the highest options to select for coverage.
I’d prefer to be covered at double those amounts in case of some crazy and unlikely scenario like getting in an accident with a G Wagon where the other driver dies. There’s also $40M aggregate of personal injury protection.
Umbrella insurance is intended to give you coverage in excess of those numbers.
You can get $3M-$5M in personal liability umbrella coverage (“plup”) for under $1k/year, but have to max out the underlying policy limits first.
And to add, you're already close to maxing out the underlying limits by default as required by auto lenders. If not financing, you should still...get similar levels to add umbrella.
For the parent, an extra 1M umbrella is an extra $2-300/y and covers beyond auto!
Thanks for the advice, I will look into that!
is that accurate? Here in Germany minimal Kfz-Haftpflichtversicherung is I believe 7 million in personal injuries and 1 million in property damages. So if a broke guy in the US runs you over and causes you half a million in health damages, puts you out of work and totals your car you'll get 30k from their insurance? How can you legally let people on the road like this
Yes, it is accurate. Welcome to USA!
And in Germany if you somehow cause more damage than that, you have to pay the remainder out of pocket, and Germany is much better at enforcing payment than any other country. That's right, if you crash into a billionaire's 2 million dollar Ferrari and total it, the state will extract one million dollars from you.
As a German living in the US, it's also interesting to me how dramatically more expensive insurance in the US is compared to Europe. The best explanation I could come up with is that 1) traffic laws are barely enforced, at least in Los Angeles you see most people driving with phone in hand and we have virtually no speed cameras or speeding enforcement, whereas in Germany, even tiny villages may have two speed cameras, one at each side of town 2) there seem to be no enforced maintenance requirements for cars in the US, whereas in Germany there's a mandatory check of the car's proper functioning every 2 years 3) insurance in the US is probably is cross-subsidizing lawyers as signified through the ubiquitous accident lawyer ads on billboards, radio etc.
Mark my words, in 2036 this story will read like a blast from the past. I read somewhere on this site recently that Waymo is about 9x safer than human drivers, and that number isn't going anywhere but up. What accidents remain will mostly be the responsibility of self driving car makers and fleet operators, and those don't deal with strip mall insurance agents. Please join me in a moment of silence for the dissolving business model of the automotive insurance industry over the next decade. And several moments of joy for tens of thousands of fewer crippled and killed people per year.
They aren't "accidents", but collisions in the vast majority of cases. Using "accident" is a loaded term that implies no fault, no blame and that it's just one of those uncontrollable facts of life. An actual road traffic accident would be something like a tree falling down onto your vehicle.
I think you’ve gotten things confused.
Automative insurance has entered the “regulatory capture” stage, which is the highest form of actualization in capitalism.
> In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it.
Uh, but not in California, because of 1988's Prop. 103. Telematics for insurance pricing are completely unavailable in California.
Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.
Isn’t that exactly the problem pointed out on the article? In an attempt to make driving more affordable, the state causes the victims of drivers to pay for their own victimization. Par the course for a CA law but still.
As a side n ote,curious if people have takes on why CA creates so many objectively garbage laws.
Worth pointing out that uninsured motorists coverage in California is quite inexpensive. And that is NOT true of Florida.
Where I disagree with the point of the article is insurance is a last resort thing. If you want to reduce traffic deaths that's not where to focus your attention. Reading the article it smells of neoliberal thinking.
Some aspects of Prop. 103 work. The definition of "good driver" as everyone who hasn't caused a fatality in the last 3 years is not one of those aspects.
I've long thought that black boxes for drivers can also act to detect various diseases. If someone's smoothness of driving suddenly starts to deteriorate, then it's often a sign of early dementia or eye diseases.
Related:
Paying for Driving - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665196 - September 2026
i'm not sure that the minimum should be 1.6M, but it should be more than $30k, when the average vehicle is well above that.
I cannot stand AI writing ffs.
As someone who doesn't know most of the tells but genuinely wants to know, what are some of the things that tells you it's AI-generated?
There's the punctuation and word choice tells. And the overall voice. But let's set that aside because some human writing shows similar traits, or perhaps a human used an LLM to "fix the grammar". So I'll point out another tell that this article is pure slop:
This article is overflowing with links, numbers, and graphs. When a human writes that densely, it takes effort to incorporate all those details. So the human only does that if each detail contributes to their argument. In this article it's mostly irrelevant. It's LLM filler to pad out an article that really has nothing to say beyond its (also LLM-scented) title.
Interesting! Thanks for explaining!
It reads like absolute dogshit.
The blog's About page says Max "writes" about transportation, but I'm skeptical he's even read his own slop here, or he would have presumably fixed some of the worst nonsense sentences before posting it. I doubt he even had the courtesy to ask Claude to run a fact-check on its output. Curse anyone who wastes my reading time like this.
It could have been an interesting article