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You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around wit

You basically need to insure yourself when using US roads. Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever -- 20% or more in some states.

remusrm 4d ago
[dead]
lostlogin 4d ago
> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.
- mrtesthah 4d ago
  So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)? Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog: https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html
  - rpdillon 4d ago
    Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered. I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
    - charlieyu1 4d ago
      This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.
      - lostlogin 3d ago
        You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).
  - A1kmm 4d ago
    Note that many countries who have socialised healthcare and/or accident compensation also collect taxes or levies for higher risk activities as part of the base to pay for it all. For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance. The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
  - jjav 4d ago
    Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees. You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
    - charlieyu1 4d ago
      So why is someone who is not an employer, subsiding other employers in their purchase of employee insurance?
      - mitxela 3d ago
        What does that even mean? The insurance is for the person who gets a hand cut off in an industrial accident. It's not for the employer.
        charlieyu1 3d ago
        So it is the employer who has to pay for it, not other citizens.
        jjav 3d ago
        Who pays is not that simple. The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee. So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer. So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates. But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company. So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer. So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
  - mitxela 3d ago
    Everyone benefits from a universal accident coverage scheme.
- deepsun 4d ago
  Who pays for that?
  - robotnikman 4d ago
    Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
    - theossuary 4d ago
      And the current politicians. 2.2T just this year, unbelievable.
    - porkshoe 4d ago
      Politicians of the past? We're on track for an annual deficit that exceeds everything but the 2020/2021 covid era. The politicians of the present are the issue. It turns out that even broad consumption taxes in the guise of tariffs aren't enough to offset gigantic permanent tax breaks for the wealthiest.
    - throw0101a 4d ago
      > The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt. Between his first term and his second term to date (2+ more years), Trump is responsible for more that one quarter (29%) of US debt (USD 11.6T / 40T): * https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-biden/ https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide... There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
    - deleted 3d ago
      [deleted]
Gibbon1 4d ago
Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
- MattGaiser 4d ago
  A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
  - quickthrowman 4d ago
    “Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area. > Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film)
  - treetalker 4d ago
    “Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency. Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state. Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
loloquwowndueo 4d ago
lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.
- expedition32 4d ago
  It doesn't help that literally every medical procedure in America is automatically 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world. And any US hospital administrator will pump that injured foreigner for all he or she's worth. At least the quality of care is decent.
- slumberlust 3d ago
  Wouldn't the insurance company's incentive be to sell you the most coverage they can?
  - kube-system 3d ago
    Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.
Hikikomori 4d ago
In Sweden if you register a car and have no insurance you're automatically on the governments but it's 3x more expensive than normal.
- kube-system 3d ago
  Most US states require proof of insurance to register a car. Some people just cancel their insurance after registration, and others simply don’t register it.

remusrm 4d ago

[dead]

lostlogin 4d ago

> Forget the ridiculous minimum coverage requirements, a huge percentage of Americans drive around with no insurance whatsoever Here in New Zealand you aren’t required to have insurance at all, although every gets healthcare and lost wages paid for (ACC) in cases of injury, which is a kind of insurance.

mrtesthah 4d ago
So in order words, non-drivers are forced to subsidize drivers (who risk the lives and property of others)? Here’s a comparison of US public subsidization of the costs of driving, from the same blog: https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html https://maxmautner.com/2026/09/10/paying-for-driving.html
- rpdillon 4d ago
  Non-drivers benefit from roads and vehicles, since they are part of society. Many non-drivers order from Amazon, for example, and are reliant on someone being able to actually deliver what they ordered. I'm responding to you, because this smacks of the same rhetoric I hear with schools: "Oh, all the non-parents have to subsidize the education of other people's kids?" Well, yes, those kids grow up and deliver your mail or treat your cancer.
  - charlieyu1 4d ago
    This is a very different thing though. People ordering from Amazon already paid for the insurance for the trip with delivery fees. And I don't think you can bring up public services as an example. Non-drivers should not be paying for damages caused by reckless drivers, the drivers should pay for insurance, especially when drivers are the same group of people who complain about fundings of public transport.
    - lostlogin 3d ago
      You’re describing another (intentional) part of NZs ACC. It frees up the courts. This suit is just covered, and the courts don’t get bogged down (well, they do, just not with this stuff).
- A1kmm 4d ago
  Note that many countries who have socialised healthcare and/or accident compensation also collect taxes or levies for higher risk activities as part of the base to pay for it all. For example, all Australian states and New Zealand have fuel excise / taxes where some types of fuel used for motor vehicles have significant extra taxes above normal cost. Some Australian states require drivers to pay an annual personal injury levy to a government department per vehicle (usually just shy of AU$1000/year in Victoria, for example), while others require private insurance covering personal injury. New Zealand has an accident compensation scheme that levies people based on the type of work they do (which factors in risk of work-related injury), and Australia (federally) also levies everyone for healthcare based on income and whether they have private insurance. The main difference from the US is that medical care is socialised rather than the victims of road injuries (who are not necessarily drivers) subsidising drivers.
- jjav 4d ago
  Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group? The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes. If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance. Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees. You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.
  - charlieyu1 4d ago
    So why is someone who is not an employer, subsiding other employers in their purchase of employee insurance?
    - mitxela 3d ago
      What does that even mean? The insurance is for the person who gets a hand cut off in an industrial accident. It's not for the employer.
      - charlieyu1 3d ago
        So it is the employer who has to pay for it, not other citizens.
        jjav 3d ago
        Who pays is not that simple. The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee. So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer. So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates. But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company. So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer. So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.
- mitxela 3d ago
  Everyone benefits from a universal accident coverage scheme.
deepsun 4d ago
Who pays for that?
- robotnikman 4d ago
  Taxpayers. Imo if we didn't have such high national debt in the US, those interest payments to the debt could have instead been used for something like national health insurance. The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt.
  - theossuary 4d ago
    And the current politicians. 2.2T just this year, unbelievable.
  - porkshoe 4d ago
    Politicians of the past? We're on track for an annual deficit that exceeds everything but the 2020/2021 covid era. The politicians of the present are the issue. It turns out that even broad consumption taxes in the guise of tariffs aren't enough to offset gigantic permanent tax breaks for the wealthiest.
  - throw0101a 4d ago
    > The politicians of the past really screwed us all with the debt. Between his first term and his second term to date (2+ more years), Trump is responsible for more that one quarter (29%) of US debt (USD 11.6T / 40T): * https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-biden/ https://time.com/article/2026/08/21/national-debt-trump-bide... There was a bit of a mitigating circumstance of COVID (for Trump and Biden), which caused the debt to jump for many countries as well (and not just the US), but it's not like Trump et co are helping the math along with all the tax cuts and asking for a US$ >1T military budget.
  - deleted 3d ago
    [deleted]

Gibbon1 4d ago

Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.

MattGaiser 4d ago
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
- quickthrowman 4d ago
  “Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area. > Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon,_Florida_(film)
- treetalker 4d ago
  “Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency. Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state. Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.

loloquwowndueo 4d ago

lol as a Canadian my insurance company recommends the maximum civil liability coverage (2 million) if one plans to drive in the US. Those lawsuit-happy Americans and their private health care systems haha.

expedition32 4d ago
It doesn't help that literally every medical procedure in America is automatically 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world. And any US hospital administrator will pump that injured foreigner for all he or she's worth. At least the quality of care is decent.
slumberlust 3d ago
Wouldn't the insurance company's incentive be to sell you the most coverage they can?
- kube-system 3d ago
  Apparently not because you can’t even get a $2m liability car insurance policy in the US that I am aware of. Most top out at 500k and to get anything more you’ll need an umbrella policy.

Hikikomori 4d ago

In Sweden if you register a car and have no insurance you're automatically on the governments but it's 3x more expensive than normal.

kube-system 3d ago
Most US states require proof of insurance to register a car. Some people just cancel their insurance after registration, and others simply don’t register it.