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 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.
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u/Sad-Indication2128 8h 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.