this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
41 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43907 readers
1364 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yep. I can only speak to my experiences that occurred over a decade ago. I will say that everyone was shocked at how relatively easy to deal with they were at the time. I imagine as wildfires become more common and hit more populated areas that insurance will refuse to pay out more often. In our case, it was the most expensive fire that had ever hit our state, since most previous ones had occurred in remote areas.
We were actually lucky that our house wasn't ruined because my parent's policy actually changed at midnight the night the fire destroyed the neighborhood. I can only imagine the insurance trying to get out of paying up in that scenario.
Usually for cases where insurance is not feasible because of increased risk of for example wild fires, the government steps in and an insurance pool is created to cover the costs of rebuilding and temporary relocation. But it happens only after insurance companies start to retreat more broadly. I assume they cannot stop paying out especially fire claims because the costs that need to be reimbursed are immediate and will be agreed to when the fire is being reported - which usually happens within hours. All in all it would be kind of dump of an insurer to refuse payout in a case like a fire. There either was a fire or there wasn’t. So not much room for push-back I would assume. But not a lawyer so I am just being hopeful here haha.
I think the most likely outcome is that they will remove coverage for wildfires, which would likely have to be purchased separately like flood insurance works today. You are correct that if it is covered by the terms of the insurance they pretty much have to pay out at that point, as it is a contractual obligation.
I wonder how much money it would cost them to fight the subset of customers who took them to court over refused payouts?
Like if they refuse to pay out 10 x $500,000 payouts, as long as the legal fees and fines they’d pay to avoid prison costs then less than $5m, they’re making profit on a policy of “deny every claim”.