This is an interesting story in terms of the details of how insurance valuates risk trying to function as a post-event risk mitigation mechanism. but there is a bypassing of a discussion of if it makes any sense for private entities to be the ones in our economy and society to be the ones mitigating this risk. For one, it makes little sense to pay private insurance to buffer for one class of remote risks, when what businesses (and society) needs is good general resilience measures for a whole set of potential correlated low risk / high impact events.
As to why didn't any but insurance for pandemics, one should think about the root causes on why the US does such a bad job of mitigate all sorts of general disaggregated risks of catastrophic health outcomes with universal healthcare, as well as why the nations of the world to varying degrees, basically don't mitigate the general correlated risk of climate crisis. Imo the private financialized insurance mechanisms are an inadequate risk mitigation tool for many issues.
I think we should not outsource things that we should do by ourselves to government or insurance companies. If the problem is too big, these entities can fail. We should start by taking those responsibility personally.
Hasn't all of history gone in the opposite direction? People used to be more "self-reliant", and then when something unexpected happened, say, crops failed in a region, millions would die and millions more would have to take everything they had and migrate somewhere with more opportunity.
If you need something, and it exists in the world, what fundamental advantage is there in having that thing be off limits? Or in having the burden of providing placed on a few rather than many?
As to why didn't any but insurance for pandemics, one should think about the root causes on why the US does such a bad job of mitigate all sorts of general disaggregated risks of catastrophic health outcomes with universal healthcare, as well as why the nations of the world to varying degrees, basically don't mitigate the general correlated risk of climate crisis. Imo the private financialized insurance mechanisms are an inadequate risk mitigation tool for many issues.