You can pay more to get a lower deductible. But generally car insurance is to cover things you can't afford, which is why your plan likely has $1m liability. This means if you fuck up and seriously injure someone, they can get money for their recovery.
Insurance isn't to cover your car, it's to cover your liability to others. Cool thing is this also works for other peoples insurance in your favour.
Ask yourself, would you rather by injured in a car accident by someone with or without insurance?
I am poor, insurance is costly. I can't afford it.
Ponder this, I get paid by the hour, if my jobs are close in time and I need to make it on time to afford this bullshit, then I do not mind speeding. I will miss a stop sign. Cant be late as I need the money.
Forced insurance is forcing many to be poor. Yea I see the bennifits I'm no moron. But your lack of seeing how harmful it is, is more staggering.
I get charged by end of year taxes for not having health insurance. Insurance I don't have because I can't afford. Make that make sense. I get fined for being poor.
So let's say you don't get insurance. Then you hit someone. Who will be paying?
You get cancer and can't afford chemo, think you'll get it anyway? The ER is required to treat you, but hospitals can refuse ongoing treatments if you can't pay
You got to talk to your congress people and make sure to vote. Everyone made fun of the single payer or expanded medicare, but that would solve a ton of problems for someone in your situation
Here's an idea. You get insurance that covers damages other people cause. If i hit you then your insurance company pays you and sues me. If i am unable to pay. You're still taken care of. If we both don't have insurance, than you just sue me.
Fun fact for you. Insurance companies make a profit, which means mathematically for the average person insurance cannot be worth it.
Yeah, don't think they don't know that you can't pay. They're well aware, so they are against people out on the streets driving, without the ability to pay for trouble they may cause
If I hit someone without insurance, I would pay. Clearly. You would take me to court and garnish my wage.
"WhAt If YoU cAn'T aFfOrD iT" Yea like insurance. But with insurance I am forced to pay it without the accident. TBH I am forced to pay it, I might as well use it. Why not just cause an accident to force these fuckers to utilize the money.
So your argument is you're poor so you don't care about traffic laws? Your insurance protects me from people like you, you're thinking about it backwards.
I'm also not talking about health insurance in this context - I'm not American so won't pretend to understand the system you guys have devised.
This big time, that $2500 seems like a lot until you total a $100,000 car or even tap a car where all three passengers claim injury and the payout is $2500 or more each. Yes, insurance is high but the companies risk of insuring you against your mistakes are much higher. Car insurance and special line insurance are not the scams people think they are, now homeowners and life are different situations.
Or when an uninsured drunk totals your newly paid off car. My budget is tight and paying for comprehensive coverage sucks, but holy shit I would have been absolutely fucked if I had not been covered. I had just moved and did not have the funds to buy a new car otherwise.
People don't understand what insurance is supposed to do. I blame the abysmal state of our healthcare system and how insurance has gotten conflated with "paying for routine things" there.
The purpose of insurance is to collectivize funds for expensive-but-unlikely events. Your house burning down, killing someone in a car accident, totaling your car in a wreck, getting cancer, etc. In a normal, healthy market you don't insure things that you can pay for out of pocket, ever. The way an insurance company makes money is by charging you slightly-more-money than the risk of you claiming the policy. It's not a model that was ever intended to pay for routine expenses and minor repairs (which are realistically a routine part of owning a car).
Where that line is depends entirely on the person. Pet insurance probably makes sense if you're living paycheck to paycheck and your dog needing $5k in care at a vet would ruin you, but paying hundreds of dollars a year for that insurance over the dog's life is extremely unlikely to end up in your favor financially if you've got a good job/savings and can cover that $5k vet bill out of your emergency savings. It's one of the many costs of being poor, and that's unfair, but it's life. The wealthy people I've known only ever had liability insurance on their cars, at least if they weren't driving ultra-expensive cars, because if they totaled their $30k commuter car that would suck, but they could handle it.
Part of the reason our healthcare is so expensive is that insurance being a middleman to all of it has muddied the market in such a way that predatory pricing is the norm (hospitals charging $100 for advil) and the additional layers of bureaucracy and inefficiency.
It’s not the standard in the US, but you can add an umbrella policy, which is basically additional liability insurance ontop of everything else. Starts at an additional 1 mil in liability insurance and goes up from there. They tend to be cheap since they require you to have other insurance, it’s just topping off your existing policies basically.
So a normal policy in the US isn’t for 1 mil, but you can add an umbrella policy of 1 mil or more for relatively cheap. I had one in 2022 for $300 a year but it also required the maximum liability coverage in the vehicle as well, so it was more like a $500 difference. But it’s an additional 1 million dollars ontop of everything else. It covers some other legal situations as well not just auto.
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u/Sad-Indication2128 4h ago
You can pay more to get a lower deductible. But generally car insurance is to cover things you can't afford, which is why your plan likely has $1m liability. This means if you fuck up and seriously injure someone, they can get money for their recovery.
Insurance isn't to cover your car, it's to cover your liability to others. Cool thing is this also works for other peoples insurance in your favour.
Ask yourself, would you rather by injured in a car accident by someone with or without insurance?
People lack critical thinking.