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| Thread: Insurance price, equality (gender) |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 · «PREV |
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Tsar-Ivor
Promising
Legendary Hero
Scourge of God
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posted December 22, 2012 05:24 PM |
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I believe a more accurate approach should be used, instead of this half-assed method of risk calculation, that has been proven to be illegal. (to act on it anyway)
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"No laughs were had. There is only shame and sadness." Jenny
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gnomes2169
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Duke of the Glade
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posted December 22, 2012 05:39 PM |
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I wouldn't bother your pretty little heads over this boys. I mean, you can afford to pay more from the extra 14/20% you earn in wages than us poor, safe, girly drivers.
If you work the same amount of time you will make just as much monies (in the states at least). And yes, that includes over time. No babies for you Meroe. 
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ALSO: THREAD MOVED TO OSM.
HIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSS *Runs away*
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Yeah in the 18th century, two inventions suggested a method of measurement. One won and the other stayed in America.
-Ghost destroying Fred
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MeanMan
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 22, 2012 06:56 PM |
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Quote:
Suppose I'm driving on ice at normal rate of speed and my car skids and causes a four car pile-up. My insurance premium is going to skyrocket even though it wasn't really my fault. Could happen to anyone. Is that really a good predictor of whether I'm going to be in an accident again?
yes, it might be a good predictor of whether you are going into a accident again. Because quite frankly, no one can chose his her/gender. But you can chose to stay at home when you know streets are icy or about to get icy. Or you can chose to travel with public transit like a railroad for example if you have to go out somewhere. If you drive with normal speed on a icy road and cause a accident, you should pay more, because this is totally and unconditionally your own fault. Excuses like "i wasn't aware of the street conditions" don't count, because as a homo sapiens you should be able to watch News, or use your brain and recognize the possibility of icy streets on your own and react accordingly to it.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 22, 2012 09:23 PM |
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I see, so your solution is to just abandon risk analysis in favor for emotional approach, and punish everyone to cover the cost of people who are in higher risk categories.
I think you first need to check whether this particular risk analysis has any scientific value at all and then draw whatever conclusions. What makes you think that the insurance companies even care about the accuracy of the statistical information, let alone its interpretation and context?
As for the EU (and generally actually) - men tend to drive more than women, but what matters in this case is the number of the licensed drivers where the the numbers are much closer as the quantity of the licensed female drivers is steadily increasing absolutely and relatively (don't have any stats at hand right now, sorry) - so it certainly makes sense that the insurance companies want to gain some extra profit through lobbies in the official institutions, using trivial façades like "equal rights", but this time with a claim that the sexual discrimination is reversed. Question is - why instead of increasing the cost for the female drivers they don't reduce the cost for the males? And the BBC article almost sounds like the poor insurance companies are forced (you see) to make this move by the almighty ECJ. 
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 22, 2012 09:55 PM |
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What makes you think that the insurance companies even care about the accuracy of the statistical information, let alone its interpretation and context?
Because it's in their interest. If men are on average riskier than women, it makes sense to charge them more - the insurance company would lose money if it didn't, or have to charge everyone higher premiums regardless of gender. If it's charging men too much (compared to how much it should charge them based on their risk), then it's pushing some men away from driving (for example, they'd use public transportation instead), and then the insurance company loses some customers and forgoes income.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 22, 2012 10:09 PM |
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It certainly did not understand what I'm asking.
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blizzardboy
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
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posted December 22, 2012 10:20 PM |
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Auto insurance companies are in fierce competition with one another. They simply can't get away with charging men more than what the risk merits without having another company offering a slightly better rate for them and drawing away customers.
Comparative auto insurance quotes are available instantly online, which makes it literally one of the least flexible systems there is as far as the company is concerned. They have to painstakingly grind down the different possible numerical outcomes of each person's premium when compared against the rates other insurer's are offering, and hopefully appeal to enough of a certain demographic. Top that off with the fact that there are merciless 3rd party agencies that make a living off of scrutinizing the value (the cost versus what you get out of it) out of all sorts of insurers and other companies. It's the proverbial dynamite perched against the nutsack.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted December 22, 2012 11:32 PM |
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What makes you think that the insurance companies even care about the accuracy of the statistical information, let alone its interpretation and context?
To elaborate on what was already said, I think you can agree that at the very least, it's important for insurance companies to care about the accuracy of statistical information to make sure they can appropriately set premiums to ensure that the money they collect from premiums is at least equal to the amount they pay out in claims. In other words, if they didn't care about accurate statistics, there's a chance that they'd pay out more than they collect, and no business can operate like that. Therefore, good risk analysis is important if only to ensure the company can be profitable (or at least break even). (Don't believe me? Why do casinos care about statistics so much? To ensure that the amount of dollars being brought in always excedes the amount they pay out, of course! A when you get down to it, casinos and insurance companies both operate under very simily types of risk analysis principles.)
Of course, once the company knows what is the minimum it needs to set premiums in order to break even, the company can add to the cost of premiums to make profit (and, let's not discout, to insulate against deviations from statistical predictions - months with more claims than expected, in other words - and to cover costs of doing business, dealing with government regulations, and so forth). I know, profit is anathema to all you people, but insurance companies can't set premiums too high because there are lots of insurance companies out there. Competition drives premium costs down naturally.
Trust me, an insurance company that did NOT care about the accuracy of statistical information wouldn't be in business very long. This is why the industry employs so many underwriters and other employees that constantly analyse risk scenarios. Risk is not something that stays stagnant. It's always changing, and insurance companies have to continually do research so they know what is the best way to set premiums in order to ensure that, on average, they're always turning a profit.
By the way, people love to vilify insurance companies, but they do serve a very important function in modern society. Like any industry it is profit driven, but whatever the downsides of this it is a far better solution than government run insurance. The competition model keeps prices lower and ensures better service. Government run insurance is and will be hopelessly mired in bureaucracy, will be cost ineffective, and will be very dependent on politics. I don't think that's good for anyone. Like any industry there is an appropriate level of governmental regulation, but people need to understand that when the government starts telling the insurance industry to ignore certain indicators of risk out of political expediency, all it does is end up costing EVERYONE more money. To me that's far more unfair than the inequities such regulations and laws aim to correct.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 22, 2012 11:36 PM |
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Corribus, I am no fan of government but do you have any evidence that tax-financed insurances are always worse and more expensive than private insurances?
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Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted December 23, 2012 05:51 AM |
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Always is a strong word and I'm not willing to use it, no matter how much I believe that whatever private enterprise can do, government will do worse, but an example of how public run insurance systems cost more than private ones might be medicare. Some people might point out that it's not a strictly fair example since there are a lot of differences between medicare and private health insurance - the biggest being that medicare is statutorily prohibited from doing conventional risk analyses to determine coverage. But I guess that's kind of the point. Given how complex these things are, it's virtually impossible to compare the costs of medicare to the costs of traditional health insurance providers in an apples-to-apples way so as to claim this example as a clear piece of evidence in support of what I'm saying. However most people (well, maybe not people in Congress and probably a lot of democrats) agree that medicare is unsustainable in its current form, and nonpartisan bodies often point to all the problems with it. GAO, for instance, has found on many occasions that medicare is woefully vulnerable to fraud, far more so than private health insurance providers. That alone probably makes medicare far less cost efficient, and this would likely be true of any public insurance system given the bureaucracy involved and, because profit isn't on the line, there's little incentive to make the system less porous.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 23, 2012 09:40 AM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 09:42, 23 Dec 2012.
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Perhaps I have to elaborate. You put too much stress on the risk analysis as a scientific mean to guarantee one's assets and I'm not arguing at all against it but rather against the perception that the risk analysis that the insurance companies make is scientific per se. I already mentioned that statistics are nothing without a context, especially in cases where a given event consists of multiple factors. Here's an example:
A typical chart like the ones that can be found on various sites will tell you that, say, men have participated as drivers in 1000 car accidents for every 600 car accidents where the driver was a woman. This still means nothing more than that in the first case the driver was male and in the second - female. The reason for the accident comes next. Let's say it's labelled "reckless driving" - that still doesn't say what was the cause for this reckless driving. A very common reason among the young men for example is the desire to impress or "thrill" someone who's in the same car and that someone is usually a girl who certainly doesn't object against being impressed that way (and can even encourage the whole thing). Of course you can't fine or otherwise penalise a non-driver for the dumb driver's actions in case of an accident because the driver is the one who's ultimately responsible for his safety and the safety of the other people on the road but certainly won't be a stretch to tell that he's not the only responsible - still, the chart will hardly take that into account;
Another reason could be - and again very often is - drunk driving which is definitely a predominantly male virtue, not even age-limited, and will show on the chart accordingly. Then again it's harder to impossible to get your insurance payment in case of an accident if it turns out that you've been intoxicated so essentially the chart shows something which favours higher insurance costs for men but is not really a high risk for the insurance companies because often they won't pay or will pay less (except in cases when another person's property is damaged badly by the perpetrator). There was even a discussion in Germany last year about making the insurance invalid if the driver is caught driving intoxicated (plus a decision of the federal court) though I'm not sure if this became an actual law;
Then come the drivers of heavy duty vehicles and buses who are almost always men. Pretty often - especially on international assignments - they tend to drive for many hours without taking a break in order to reach some destination as scheduled and as a result their driving skills worsen after some time and they become more susceptible to accidents. They will enter the "male" part of the chart, however in this case they almost never own the vehicle that they drive and the fact that there are very few female drivers of such vehicles makes the whole per-gender analysis meaningless (it will be the same as to tax members of the native population for police protection higher than the naturalised population because the native population is more numerous and thus more likely to take part in a crime).
Shortly put, the point is that a chart stating simply that "male drivers are more likely to participate in a car accident than female drivers" is just manipulative without taking the context and other details into account. A really scientific risk analysis is not in the insurance companies' favour, what they would care about is if number X is > or = or < than number Y and how this can be used to increase their profit - which is what most market-orientated private entities care about. So I don't think it's serious to talk about science here.
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master_learn
Legendary Hero
walking to the library
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posted December 23, 2012 11:43 AM |
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Risk is not something that stays stagnant. It's always changing, and insurance companies have to continually do research so they know what is the best way to set premiums in order to ensure that, on average, they're always turning a profit.
When economists talk about risk as one of the factors in the economy,they talk about systemic risk and risk from the circumstaances or individual risk.
I would say that one of the risks for not receiveing money from the insurance company is not only your individual risk from braking some element from the contract,but the risk of the company been bankrupt.
I think one systemic risk would be the case,when all the insurance companies from a country go for lower prices and that begins to result in losses for them.
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"I heard the latest HD version disables playing Heroes. Please reconsider."-Salamandre
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GoodDude
Tavern Dweller
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posted June 25, 2019 01:32 PM |
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Edited by GoodDude at 13:33, 25 Jun 2019.
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Tsar-Ivor said:
About bloody [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20803184#]time[/url].
950 dollars for 6 months at this company [url=https://www.total-insurance.co.uk/motor-trade-insurance/]Traders Insurance[/url] . Do you think that's a lot? -No, their services are worth it. For example once my Tesla broke - it was just stalled on the road. As it turned out then, something was wrong with the transmission. So, I called my company, and they sent a tow truck and they took my Tesla to their auto repair shop and they offered to fix it. So, they offered me a discount for repairs in the amount of 65%! Can you imagine? So I saved about $ 800-900 for this repair, and till now nothing has broken
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Blizzardboy
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
Nerf Herder
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posted June 25, 2019 01:51 PM |
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I rescind my opinion from 2012. I don't believe it should be legal for insurance companies to charge men more.
Don't feel like giving a full explanation, but long story short: deficit thinking encourages bad behavior, i.e. "If they already think I'm a communist, I might as well be a communist".
Profiling is harmful to individuals and unhealthy for society.
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"Folks, I don't trust children. They're here to replace us."
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Oddball13579
Supreme Hero
Grandmaster of the Hunt
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posted June 25, 2019 08:35 PM |
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What kind of insurance are we talking about here? Auto? Home? Life? Medical?
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"Just slide her down a bit farther. I could wear her like a hat." - Gnomes
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monere
Bad-mannered
Supreme Hero
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posted June 25, 2019 08:38 PM |
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Oddball13579 said:
What kind of insurance are we talking about here? Auto? Home? Life? Medical?
yes
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Oddball13579
Supreme Hero
Grandmaster of the Hunt
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posted June 25, 2019 08:56 PM |
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monere said:
Oddball13579 said:
What kind of insurance are we talking about here? Auto? Home? Life? Medical?
yes
Ah. Well okay, let me see. Well for starters we have universal healthcare here, so we don't pay for medical insurance per say. As for auto insurance, I can only talk for BC because it varies province to province. But here in BC our auto insurance company has a monopoly so they can charge whatever they want (and they are running a huge deficit because of this but that's another story) so if you are a new driver you pay a very expensive fee and as the years go by you gain a deduction for being a safe driver. So every few years without an incident (collision) you get a percentage shaved off of your insurance. Although that deduction hardly matters and is minuscule when compared to what you still have to pay.
I don't really know much about life or home insurance to comment.
But yeah, I don't think we charge based on gender here in Canada.
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"Just slide her down a bit farther. I could wear her like a hat." - Gnomes
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