You know what’s horribly unfair and corrupt? Mandatory car insurance. I never had a chance to think about it before but now it has become obvious that this is nothing but a form of taxation where the revenues go directly to private companies. And it’s a pretty high tax.
And you just summed up people’s problems with the health insurance mandate.
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What about a damage a driver can do to a third party and be unable to pay without car insurance?
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As I recently discovered, car insurance companies don’t actually pay anything to anybody. In case of an accident – even one that is totally not your fault – you still end up paying because they just jack up the monthly payments!
P.S. I haven’t been in an accident (spit, spit, spit), in case people start worrying. But my husband’s car was rear-ended by some stupid goat and it turned out that car insurance is useless in this case. And on the next day we got a regular bill from the car insurance company in the amount of $700. My question is: why are we paying these enormous sums if even in a case of accident the insurance company doesn’t really reimburse?
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So N’s hit the deductible AND he’s not at fault AND the other person’s insurance won’t pay AND the other person’s insurance won’t pay AND they raised his rates? Ugh.
Supposedly you have car insurance to mitigate lose-your-assets catastrophes.
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No, he didn’t even try to get paid by the insurance company. It was cheaper just to pay for the repairs from his own pocket.
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third party insurance is part of the coverage of Australian driver’s licences.
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You can’t be serious.
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I’ve yet to hear about what it is car insurance covers and how.
I was once in the middle of a small pile up (the car ahead of me stopped suddenly, I managed to just stop in time but the car after me didn’t). My insurance paid nothing even though I was not held to be at fault and the company of the car in front of me (the driver of which kept thanking god for all the car insurance she had). It was the poor uninsured driver was held to be financially responsible for the whole thing.
If anyone can explain how car insurance works (besides taking money and not paying anything) then I would like to hear it.
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Since my husband’s first job was as an actuary in an insurance company, I can share the information that the scenario of the insurance company taking money and not giving anything in return is the most frequent one. 😦
I never thought much about it because I didn’t drive but now I have become more interested in the issue and have discovered some alarming things.
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“and the company”
shoudl be
“and neither did the company”
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Hmm, we must have got lucky: my husbands car was recently wrecked by a driver with no insurance (who was entirely at fault and who fled the scene, only to be apprehended later due to the actions of quick-thinking witnesses). Anyway, my husband’s insurance gave us slightly more money than we estimated the car had been worth, as well as paying a little extra for a rental car for a while. And his premiums have stayed the same (so far anyway). I didn’t think they were allowed to raise them for a no-fault accident – unless that is just CA law.
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Insurance is worse than taxation. It’s inversely proportional to the ability to pay, thanks to redlining and now “credlining”
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