American, living in area prone to natural disasters: "Is the WHOLE WORLD becoming uninsurable?"
The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
It’s possible that solve the hurricane problems with proper building regulations and lower the risk of huge wildfires with controlled burning. But the US as always prefers to pretend that there’s nothing to be done when other parts of the world has figured it out.
We have cyclones here similar to the hurricanes in the US and usually it just blows over some trees maybe causes a power outage.
The absolute worst I have experienced was 3 days without power. I have never seen a house destroyed by a cyclone here.
As for wildfires, they do unfortunately claim a few houses most years.
Hurricanes are mostly just flood damage in the US, and some wind/debris damage exactly like the blown over trees you mention.
Houses generally aren't destroyed by hurricanes in the sense of "the storm literally ripped them up", they're made uninhabitable by storm surges (flood).
The scary ones are tornados.
And tornados do genuinely fuck shit up. Even in those "enlightened" parts of the world you think have proper building regulations. If you're interested, go look at the recaps of tornado damage where they hit Europe here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_tornadoes_and...
Note the number of homes destroyed and people killed - plenty of both, even in those countries that prefer brick/concrete homes.
Tornadoes are quite a bit less common outside of North America, and especially the US. Some of that comes down to the absence of people in the places where tornadoes occur, so there's no one there to report them.
The Tornado Archive (https://tornadoarchive.com/) has a pretty well executed map to illustrate that. They report that between 2011 and 2021 (just the dates I punched in, so its possible the actual ratio is a bit different from that), the world saw ~20,000 reported tornadoes. North America reported 12,000 of them.
So its not just that Americans maybe don't know how to build tornado resistant structures. Its that the US and Canada's per-capita tornado rate is quite a bit higher than the rest of the world.
Also, the list of tornadoes the GP refers to in Europe are mostly F0-F2 severity. These don't often cause high fatalities and injuries in the US either (on par with what's reported there). The problem is that tornadoes in the US Midwest and Southeast are often in the F3-F5 range, which are much deadlier. An F3 tornado includes winds to 165 mph, which is considered a category 5 in the hurricane scale. They don't last nearly as long, but high intensity tornadoes can cause catastrophic damage in seconds where they hit directly, unless the shelter is literally underground.
The quantity of energy in an F5 tornado is literally on the same scale as a nuclear weapon, albeit delivered more slowly. Given that context, their ability erase towns should not be that surprising. You can't engineer a practical structure capable of withstanding those kinds of forces.
> quantity of energy […] is […] on the same scale as a nuclear weapon
> albeit delivered more slowly.
> those kinds of forces.
Tornados are very powerful, but if you deliver the same amount of energy over a longer time frame, the forces go down accordingly.
On the other hand, tornados do damage on a relatively smaller path. That may mean they’re as destructive as a nuclear bomb, but within a much smaller affected area.
Of course you can. Arcologies! Super practical, compact, safe, efficient! Tornadoes do most of the damage at the bottom, so taller structures gain advantage. If there's a huge mass pushing down on the bottom parts the tornado won't be able to dislodge it.
There's also that, but I didn't go to the effort of investigating the rate of various strengths. I'll bet their data explorer shows that aspect of the phenomenon too.
I suspect that a major factor is that the great plains of North America are at a lower latitude than e.g. the Eurasian steppes, so 1) there are fewer people living there and 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This whole line of reasoning "Americans must be bad at house construction, look at all the destruction wrought by hurricanes/tornadoes/etc" just feels disingenuous to me. Like observing "look at how much better the British are at building volcano/earthquake proof buildings, you never hear about people losing their houses to lave in the UK!".
> 2) the confluence of meteorological circumstances needed to generate a lot of tornadoes (and therefore a larger population of very destructive tornadoes) just aren't present anywhere else in the world.
This is in fact a huge part of our tornado risk in the US. The long north-south region of mountainous/high elevation (i.e. the rockies) going into a large low elevation flat region, helps create the 'layering' of different air temperatures that cause tornadoes once the current changes enough for the top/bottom layer to turn into a column.
Tornados might be more intense but only for a short period of time and in a small area. I don't see any of those where the tornado is lasting days, causing sustained damage. There are some where there are multiple tornadoes in a span, but each individual tornado is itself quick and violent but localized within a mile or so at most.
Compare some incidents with, Hurricane Sandy, for example, where it traveled across the span of a thousand miles and lasted a week of damages.
Tornadoes seem like a phenomenon for which insurance is actually a pretty good part of the solution. I mean, it is very unlikely for anything in particular to get hit by a tornado, but it is really devastating. It might take an unreasonable amount of work to build everything to the level where it can sustain a direct hit by a tornado. The expected value of tornado damage is quite low overall, we just need to deal with the individual catastrophes that occur.
Hurricanes… I mean, there are different sized hurricanes in different areas. For the ones that hit Florida, part of the solution is probably legitimately that we should have fewer people living there, because there’s going to be a widespread devastation there occasionally. And if you live in a hurricane-prone area, you are going to get hit by one eventually. (So like what’s the bet here? The insurance company knows they’ll probably have to pay out eventually).
Just to put a number to it, 2024 was apparently an unusually busy year for tornadoes, around $6B. That isn’t nothing! But one single hurricane cost $7B in 2024… and there was a $34B one… and a $79B one… who’s insuring the southern coast of the US? Seems rough.
You can build houses which are much less likely to be seriously damaged in a hurricane. Some more ambitious designs are virtually hurricane proof. You never see high rises knocked over by a hurricane, for instance. Because they are (mostly) built correctly. Otherwise downtown areas in the entire Gulf Coast, Mid-Altantic, would simply not have existed for more than a few decades.
The same goes for floods. Most of the problem with floods, is that the house frame and flooring are made of wood. And wood rots. If you live in a flood prone area, the first floor at least, should be brick or stone for just about everything. Yes its expensive. But so is is $800/month flood insurance. Or having the federal government bail you out and passing the cost on to the taxpayer
But building things correctly is more expensive, and Americans love their cheap McMansions.
Also, on an individual level there is less incentive to build correctly, because you will almost certainly not get a discount on insurance. 99% of the population is at the whim of either buying a used house, or whatever the builder's models are for new construction. Its really only possible if you are very wealthy and build your own house on your own plot.
Tokyo and much of Japan have huge expensive drainage systems to prevent their cities from flooding during the storms they have. China is in the same region and doesn’t have that infrastructure yet, so you’ll still see cities like Wuhan flood every few years. It’s a good bet that China will eventually invest in these systems like Japan has, as it matches their development model fairly well.
I’m not sure how Florida or Louisiana would deal with flooding though, they simply have nowhere for the water to go. They would have to basically pump and store it above ground somehow. It might make sense to re-level their cities with an artificial ground level a few stories above sea level.
The most impressive aspect of the Tokyo system is not the size (largest in the world), but the willingness to spend money on it. From start to finish it took less than 15 years. Chicago’s system, just as ambitious in size, is still going despite construction starting in the mid 1970s. Although to be fair, it is “complete” and operating but with reduced holding capacity: they are waiting for a handful of stone quarries away from the city to reach their end-of-life so they can dig the tunnels to them and use them for stormwater holding.
But the problem, now that these giant things exist, is that they aren’t the panacea they were thought to be. Large storms of today’s era are dumping too much water in too short an amount of time. You just can’t build big enough.
tornadoes and hail are actually a big driver of property insurance rates. they typically aren’t catastrophic but the frequency is increasing quickly and they do cause an aggregation of claims.
If you have to be inside one, pick a hurricane. But tornadoes are so much smaller. This list is like... 10-20 per year with an average of less than 1 casualty and a dozen houses damaged? That's basically zero as far as insurance and habitability go. I found a study titled "Tornadoes in Europe An Underestimated Threat" and it has an estimate of 10-50 million euros per year in total damage. That's not even 1 euro per house in Europe.
Let's not be silly here. European tornadoes are not taking apart houses to the foundations. Ripping off roofs or flipping over cars or even when trees are falling on a tourist tent and killing them in process has nothing to do with how houses are built in USA and nowadays even in UK and elsewhere.
I think the implication is that this is due to differing building codes. Europe builds houses with brick and concrete, that aren't so easily torn apart. That the difference is in housing quality, not in the weather.
The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it: Wealthy coastal landowners believe that the cost of home insurance should be about $2000/year. If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Tornados are almost the perfect example of an insurable hazard: Very low probability, very high damage, very widely distributed across the affected areas:
Click around that neat interactive map, you'll see that the tornado is typically a few miles long and a few hundred yards wide, there are a few thousand severe tornadoes scattered all over the Midwest and somewhat fewer on the east coast in the past 70 years. It's not feasible to build houses everywhere that will stand up to an F5 tornado throwing cars. But they only cause a total loss of a tiny fraction of all houses in the country, and there are relatively few choices anyone east of Texas can make that would meaningfully impact their risk.
You could price insurance premiums at the risk of a tornado times the cost of the insured assets, plus a 10% administrative fee/profit margin, and those rates would be affordable. Maybe a handful of people would choose to live in Colorado instead of a few hundred miles east in Kansas because the cost of this 'tornado insurance' was higher in Kansas, but even in Tornado Alley it wouldn't be unaffordable.
Conversely, if you look at the hurricane incidence and storm surge risk map:
It's clear that people are choosing to build houses in the narrow strip of low-lying land that's right along the coast and vulnerable to high-probability storm surges! If insurance was priced at cost of assets + administration times risk of loss, it would be really, really expensive.
> If their properties actually cost $200,000 per year to insure, then that's what they should have to pay! If they don't like it, they should either build something cheaper (that's the other half of the product) or move to somewhere with less risk.
Or build something adapted to the risk it faces. In my home town there are houses that were built on flood plains that have recently been flooding every 5 years or so. Luckily they are brick and in order to get these covered you now need to install flood barriers over the doors, and your ground floor has to be adapted to flood without sustaining damage (tile floors, special plaster etc.)
Now when we have a severe flood warning people will move their valuables upstairs if they're house floods they just have to clean out the mud. There are also a couple new houses right next to the river that float and rise and fall on stilts when the banks burst.
I think most people would go for adapting their designs, but insurance companies would have to make that offer first since they ultimately decide which designs are insurable for which amounts.
> we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
This is important. Insurance was invented 2000+ years ago but aggressively deploying technology that worsens floods, weather, and fires is only around ~100.
The real issue is global warming causing an exponential rise in tail risk events. It's exponential because even a linear shift in temperature causes an exponential rise at the tails (look at how a normal distribution works).
Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.
Global warming is going to mess up insurance as we know it for that reason. Not sure property insurance, but all kinds of insurance.
Most disasters follow power laws and other fat tail which don't have the same effects in the tail as a Gaussian. If you shift 1/x^a by c, you "only" get a polynomial increase.
But also, if you shift the mean of a Gaussian, the increase isn't exponential, it's super exponential (e^(x^2) to be specific).
> Insurance is based on statistics. The math they use assumes stationary distributions. Insurance companies can't deal with shifting distributions well so they take the losses and then exit markets.
Sure they can, that's why they hire statisticians. They routinely deal with insurance of much rarer events where we have much worse models than climate change. They're just banned from charging the actual rates, because it's politically unacceptable.
They exit markets due to regulations banning them from charging the true cost of risk. Large insurance companies don’t just go broke. They have re-insurance that caps their losses. It’s becoming far more difficult to get reinsurance and the premium caps make reinsurance unaffordable for the insurance company so they leave. The business model is managing the money - they don’t much care about the claim losses over the long term and taking 1 percent of rising premiums to be a manager is a solid business model.
> The real problem is that we're politically/socially unwilling to transfer the risk to the people who are responsible for creating it
A lot of the responsibility falls upon governments who are lobbied by developers to zone areas for development that should never have been zoned for development in the first place.
And a lot of the responsibility falls upon the developers that lobby the government for ~. They're not little children begging an adult for something bad for them, where it's the adult that should have known better. They're adults actively seeking out a deal that profits them at expense of people.
The 2024 hurricane season damage totaled $128.072 billion.
I couldn't find data for tornadoes in aggregate, only individual storms.
> Economically, tornadoes cause about a tenth as much damage per year, on average, as hurricanes. Hurricanes tend to cause much more overall destruction than tornadoes because of their much larger size, longer duration and their greater variety of ways to damage property. The destructive core in hurricanes can be tens of miles across, last many hours and damage structures through storm surge and rainfall-caused flooding, as well as from wind. Tornadoes, in contrast, tend to be a few hundred yards in diameter, last for minutes and primarily cause damage from their extreme winds
Tornados are indeed scary. I have seen a house cut in half like a knife by one. You could see the doors ripped off the medicine cabinet on the second floor and meds still on the shelf.
But tornados are also significantly smaller. A hurricane will damage a thousand square miles while a hurricane will mess up 50. It’s not quite right but the proportions are in that ballpark.
the US would avoid flood damage if they just built apartment buildings. Asian apartments towers are immune to flooding because they allocate the ground floor to parking. Can't blow the roof off a square concrete building either.
Ofc, a sufficiently strong Tornado is destroying everything in its wake. But, they're rare in comparison.
As the governments in the US get increasingly incompetent, insurance prices are going to have to rise. Government services are largely there to protect you during black swan events, so if those services get less and less effective, you're going to need more insurance for those events.
This was the whole issue. California made it illegal for insurance companies to raise rates, so the insurance companies stop renewals. Leaving everybody uninsured. Homeowners couldn't buy insurance at any price.
Public insurance. For housing, healthcare, maybe even cars (since the coprorate political complex insists that we HAVE to drive everywhere).
At some point, we have to accept that the middlemen are siphoning value, not providing any. Vanguard it and let elected admins set the codes.
This is California’s FAIR plan [1]. It’s a wealth transfer from non-homeowners to homeowners, homeowners in low-risk areas to high-risk homeowners, and from low-value homeowners to rich ones.
That was one (corrupt) option. Another would have been to draw funds by taxing homeowners, specifically, and limiting payouts by fire risk, capping at a mean replacement cost, not per-house. That that's not what happened is an issue with the implementation, not the base concept.
> draw funds by taxing homeowners, specifically, and limiting payouts by fire risk, capping at a mean replacement cost, not per-house
This almost seems designed to maximise fury. You're still taxing low-risk homeowners to pay for high-risk damages. And when a catastrophe hits, you aren't paying enough to rebuild (or avoid bankruptcy, in which case you're just routing taxpayer funds to creditors). Add to that you've branded it a tax increase it's almost something the GOP would run as a false flag against a Democrat.
Also seems very likely to cause a financial crisis that the rest of America will end up paying for anyway. If you don't pay out enough to rebuild that particular lot, then the likely outcome will be an empty lot with a burned out husk on it. In most cases, this is worth considerably less than the remaining value of the mortgage. The homeowner then walks away from the mortgage, leaving the bank holding the bag. The bank has socialized this risk by selling the mortgage as an MBS that is sitting in somebody's money-market account. Cue 2008.
Isn't this thing going to be subsidized by taxpayers in the end anyway?
California already a dumb communal insurance thing, the "California FAIR Plan" for people who can't get insurance due to high risk. They force insurance companies who operate in the state to fund it. So basically everyone has to subsidize the high-risk people... but then the insurance companies leave.
As someone who's home insurer pulled out of California and so I had to scramble to find another carrier, I looked at the FAIR plan and it is completely untenable for most people. My insurance was already high, ~$2000/year for coverage that would rebuild our house, and under FAIR it would have gone up to $12000/year.
I mostly agree with the article that insurance is grounded in statistical measures of risk and there's no point railing against it. Norms are going to have to adapt to increased risk and how we build homes and infrastructure needs to shift away from short-term, low-cost thinking to longer-term solutions with a higher-upfront cost and lower TCO given the new constraints. Things like burying power lines, aggressively managing fire danger, and homes that are built to be more sound to natural disasters have to become the status quo.
Most of these things are already possible today. In my neighborhood, PG&E did an assessment and it would cost every homeowner on the street ~$25,000 to have the power lines buried. I would have opened my wallet immediately to reduce the fire risk, but it got caught up in politics and policy. When we had some renovation on our house, my wife and I insisted on some of the work being done in ways that would make the house safer and easier to maintain over the long work. The contractor balked at first saying it would cost us an extra couple of thousand dollars. I had to point out that an extra $3000 to make sure things lasted an extra 5 - 10 years and was easier to maintain and upgrade meant nothing. But people have to insist on doing better because right now the norm is to cut corners on everything to save in many cases a negligible amount of money over the life of the work or against the cost if there is a disaster.
The building codes will need to reflect the new normal. Defensible perimeters, metal roofs and masonry or cementitious exteriors are a must for many areas going forward. Log cabins amongst the pines just aren't tenable in the West any more.
You say that... but a well built log cabin, with a Class A fire resistant roof, is rather likely to survive a wildfire unbothered if the ground a couple feet around it is kept cleared.
They're simple (not a lot of corners for burning things to wedge in), they tend very well sealed with smaller windows (so less chance of a window breaking and allowing embers in), and the amount of thermal energy it takes to light a full log on fire is quite high. Radiant heat from a forest fire isn't going to bother a log cabin. It might darken the wood somewhat, but it won't light smooth logs on fire. Even random firebrands and such lack the energy to bother wood.
The only concern would be a shake roof - that would catch fire easily and burn the place down. But a well built and "tight" roof (no massive eaves with vents into an attic, just minimal overhangs) of Class A fire resistance would work just fine.
Metal roofing is not inherently fire resistant, either - it depends on the materials, and what's below it. Some metal roofing can transfer enough heat to the wood below to light that on fire, even without direct flame spread. And, non-intuitively, a lot of asphalt shingles are Class A fire resistant when properly installed.
What doesn't work well, obviously, are the sort of expensive homes with "all the architectural features," lots of inside corners that trap debris, and an incredibly complex roofline.
People forget that you don't have to modify a McMansion to whatever requirements you're adding - you can build something entirely different.
"Earthships" or other hobbit-hole like houses are almost completely fireproof as long as the entries are handled correctly - anything that can start a fire through three feet of earth is probably a volcano anyway.
Don't most of those suffer from serious ongoing humidity problems? I've looked into that style of housing in the past, and it seems like it's always having issues with mold, mildew, and ohter "issues of running 90-100% interior humidity for long periods of time" sort of problems. I think they're okay in drier climates - IIRC they were developed in New Mexico, which is "bone dry nine months of the year, and somewhat drier the other three."
They do - and there are ways to counteract it (the usual problem is similar to damp basements compounded by the lack of air movement and humidity control).
It’s a matter of cost (it’s almost never worth it) and tradeoffs.
But if fire survivability is paramount, it is an option.
A "log cabin amongst the pines" with a decent sized "yard" clearance area, a good roof, and where the sides of the house are kept reasonably moist is pretty much fireproof.
The advantage of a metal roof as opposed to most others is the reduction of nooks and crannies where embers can get trapped and light the roof on fire. Metal roofs are also more slick, and dangerous to work on, than any gritty material. A hipped standing seam metal roof with a moderate pitch is going to shed embers pretty handily on both the windward and leeward sides.
It does seem to be backward. In my opinion, "insurance" is strictly about compensation for loss, and should absolutely be a private transaction, while preventative and emergency systems should probably be public. Healthcare coverage, despite being called "insurance," is really a system of preventative and emergency services, while California's state-run home insurance is the former. But this is what they get for trying to have price controls.
That's a great point. We'll get public insurance for houses only if the legalized bribery paid by existing insurance companies to block public ins. is less effectively applied than the money blocking public health insurance in the US. Old people don't care because they have medicare at 65+, while the rest of us slubs are going along with whatever we can find.
We get what we allow or deserve here in the US. Citizens United led to our current awful outcome.
Public insurance would provide no benefit. The issue in California is that people have built their houses in dangerous areas and have not taken any measures to reduce fire risk. The state has already set limits to how much insurance costs can be increased (from a past generation of economic illiterates who wanted to stop "middlemen siphoning value"). Therefore, insurance companies are just pulling out, which disproves the entire idea that they are "siphoning value", since obviously there is no value there to siphon.
The only thing that public insurance would do is to provide a way for the state to incur another massive unfunded liability. Except, unlike healthcare or pensions which have the somewhat laudable goal of taking care of poor people and old people, this would go to bailing out rich homeowners who made a bad investment of a house in a flammable area and then refused to spend money on fire safety measures, either in their home or their municipality.
Of course these fire zone bag holders are now clamoring for the state to take on their bad investments by pushing conspiracy theories about the evil insurance companies.
The danger of the areas has not been properly accounted for, and now that we have a better understanding, nobody wants to pay what it actually costs (either in increased insurance, which apparently CA has limited, or building design changes - knock down the flammable one and build something impervious, or even abandoning untenable locations - perhaps after disaster, perhaps before).
Everyone's talking about fire insurance, but the earthquake insurance question is even bigger and basically untenable in a worst-case scenario. So in that case, CA wised up and the state is much more earthquake resilient than it was 30 years ago.
Not sure I agree with housing insurance as a public service… we do want to expose some risk to drive behavioral changes. People really shouldn’t be building houses in low lying areas near the shoreline in Florida. But if there’s no risk because it’s covered by other tax payers, then they will.
That only guarantees you have insurance. It does not guarantee that you will be covered or made whole in an incident or emergency.
See FL Citizen's insurance and other insurances of last resort as examples.
What really needs to happen is premiums go up with the cost of risk. But this also means pricing people out of homes, vehicles, businesses, etc. And no politician will allow this.
It does seem like it's time to stop letting this "industry" profit off the misfortune of its customers. Making all of these a public service instead of private industry makes sense at this point.
The profit margins on insurance are usually pretty slim. Insurance companies are generally not well differentiated from one another, so they have few avenues to compete other than on price. A state-run insurance plan also has to operate at a profit/surplus or else it will have to be subsidized by the taxpayers. The effect is the same either way.
Margins being slim doesn't mean much as long as insurance companies see continuing operations as profitable. I'd like to see this model stress tested until more insurance companies pull out. This would cause reductions in the housing market from the increased insurance prices and subsequent mortgage reduction, and would lead to more compartmentalized insurance prices and risk approximations between high and low-risk homes.
Either that or a barrage of government policies which will make things worse for everyone and continue the US economy's descent into the death spiral.
Slim from a percentage of total premiums but substantial when looking at the absolute dollar amount of profits. It's all relative to the size of the pie.
Also, when margins are slim, a major event (like a series of wildfires in one of the biggest cities in the US) can wipe out those profits. A responsible insurer can withstand one bad year. But if those major events start happening with more frequency, then one bad year becomes a series of bad years. Reinsurance premiums for the insurer go up, meaning that taking on risk is more expensive, and they’ll eventually have to decide between raising their own premiums to unsustainable levels or pulling out of risky markets.
“Experts say the insurance landscape in California is particularly tricky because, in addition to the wildfire risk, the state has a law that adds extra approval measures, including board approval and review by the insurance commissioner, if an insurance company wants to raise the rate of insurance by more than 7%. That’s been in effect since the 1980s.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/05/what-homeowners-need-to-know...
If it's not permitted to raise the price of premiums to point where it covers the actual risk, then it's de facto illegal. Nobody will sell insurance policies at a loss.
Illegal seems fine as shorthand though. Same with housing -- "illegal" to build in many instances. Not technically illegal of course, but enough hurdles makes it effectively so.
I don't think it is incompetence of the governments. It appears to be a goal of most US politicians to add to the coffers of private business, insurance companies included, at the expense of all but the most rich Americans.
Wildfires are not the problem. They happen all the time without causing billion-dollar insurance claims. Insurance is always assets x risk. The issue is expensive flamable housing (assets) in a wildfire area (risk). We ask for trouble when we create million-dollar wooden houses surrounded by manicured gardens in desert enviroments. And build on a slope facing pervailing winds. The answer is concrete/brick houses with metal/ceramic rooves surrounded by sand/stone/concrete. Want a big green lawn? Move to the pacific northwest. Want to live near the beating heart of the movie industry, a town where it never rains? Get used to cactuses instead of rose gardens.
That doesn't align with the reality of these areas. To get insurance in these areas you have to demonstrate that you have created a defensible space around your house. This is enforced by local fire department inspections. I know this because I live near a fire prone area. Despite these things the area still burned. The problem isn't "lawns" or "wooden houses". In the case of the LA fires you would have had the burned out husks of concrete houses that would need to be demolished if everything was made of concrete. This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.
From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around. I think those houses were especially flammable more than some vegetation around it seems. After the fire nothing remained but the chimneys. I have never seen any house burn like that in Europe.
I live along the Mediterranean sea in France, many wood fires every summer, with wind above 100km/h; never seen so many houses burn like in California even when most of our houses are concrete but with wooden framework.
I'm pretty sure that if houses were built like here (concrete / concrete blocks with terracota tiles on wooden framwork) at lot less would have burnt. Maybe those near the wooded slopes but not in the middle of a neighborhood block.
I have looked on some videos of how those good looking US houses have plastic drainage, plastic material roof cladding and plastic panels inside and outside. And the first thing that I was thinking - those burn in an event of house fire. But I see more ond more building materials that were used in US now offered and being standard in building here in Europe, so most probably some of the newer houses in an event of fire will burn down in similar fashion. I'm just wondering if the commenter that mentioned "black swan event"(a very popular theme in Russia and unrelated to wildfires) actually understands that USA has plastic houses everywhere and nothing will change - new mansions will be rebuilt in burned areas with the same materials, but because they are going to offer them as fireproof branded, they will cost more. That's all - these areas won't be abandoned, because location, location and location is the only thing that matters in property business and in your property value.
> From the recent events in California I have seen many photos of burnt houses with unburnt trees around.
I think some of that can be attributed to the fact that buildings are stationary structures that have ample square-footage for embers to land and cause fires, where as trees have less stationary surface area for embers to land, remain and build into fires.
I agree climate is a bit special in south California, but what is usually done here when a fire is near a house is for the owner to sprinkle it before the fire is coming; if you take time to sprinkle the roof (which is the only part containing wood here) there is less chance for an ignition.
The reality is the fires didn't make it far into the city grid sections of LA proper. This is because these areas have less flammable material, and are more defensible.
Those protections are all about keeping a structure from catching fire. That is different than designing a structure not to burn. A wooden house surrounded by fire protection is OK under current rules. But it is still wood and will, eventually, burn when faced by a wild fire on all sides. A house built out of rock/brick/concrete/sand will not. We need to go beyond flamability and start reducing the actual number of calories availible to be burned.
I suspect the rules for making a defensible house were wrong. For example, I read an article recently that posited that most of the fire was spread by burning embers on the wind, and not by intense heat from nearby flames.
The idea is to look at where embers accumulate and eliminate or fireproof those areas. For example, a low masonry wall a few feet from the house can stop a lot of heavier burning embers from piling up against the house. If you've got a swimming pool, add a pump to it that feeds sprinklers in the yard and on the rooftop.
There are a lot of homes that did not burn - look at them and figure out why they didn't burn.
For a related example, every airplane crash is looked at, and we always discover overlooked vulnerabilities. The tsunami that devastated Japan a few years ago also provided a lot of information about what worked and didn't work.
We're a long way from needing to give up. There's a lot of low hanging fruit.
Sure, but that's how it already works. The airplane example is how building codes generally work. London didn't rebuild in wood after the Great Fire, to give an ancient, and large-scale, example.
From what I've read, the houses in LA that did survive were modern or heavily remodeled houses incorporating recent code changes to prevent embers from entering the eaves and suchlike.
It really doesn't help that most of LA was built up in the early to mid 20th century; requiring code updates during remodels can only help so much, because if the cost/change is too much/invasive the homeowners either don't remodel at all or do it without permits, bypassing the more costly safety improvements.
>This was a black swan event that will require a thoughtful response.
Taleb would have a field day with this one. Broadly, I think a big part of the argument is driven by the assumption that the area will be rebuilt, despite being a known fire risk.
Because of the Santa Ana winds (with this apparently being more than usual), you'll continually have very dry conditions with high winds and the danger of a fire getting out of control. I don't see it as a black swan either. This is a repeatable scenario, every few years they'll probably have conditions like this. The climate is changing, maybe this will spread or move to areas nearby.
I live in an area that had a special warning last summer, we had a very very dry summer and there was a period with low humidity and high winds for a few days, it was considered an unusual scenario with extreme fire risk - but nothing happened this time. Now that I'm writing this I'm wondering what I'll do if it feels like an annual occurrence. Another parallel, the power company warned us they might shut off the power to reduce risk but I guess it didn't get that bad.
A forward looking (part of a) solution for Malibu would be the county acquiring and maintaining beach paths every few houses. Prescribed 10' wide fire breaks.
This solves the fire problem AND the limited access to a public resource that is common in Malibu.
Ideally a permeable surface without any growth, cleared at least 2x a year.
especially for this fire, jumping doesnt mean that everything 2 miles down wind also burned down. buildings that far had the opportunity to burn, and if they dud, had the opportunity to burn their neighbors, and another 2 miles down.
i imagine ember density is more interesting than distance?
That would not have solved the problem in this fire since wind speed was so high. The videos showed embers traveling far and fast. Having a 10 foot fire break would not have prevented the spread. One thing to look into is how the fire started and if the electrical equipment can be made safer, like being underground in some places.
Why is the answer not Japan's approach. My understanding is that because of high incidents of natural disaster they see/build homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments.
I recall reading somewhere that the Indians had done controlled burns before Europeans settled in the parts of the U.S. where fires are now a problem. European settlers who displaced them did not continue the controlled burns and then fires became a problem. Apparently, if you do regular controlled burns, the severity of fires is reduced and healthy trees survive it. When you do not, when fires do occur, all trees die and the fires spread out of control.
I recall reading the same thing, however I do recall that they were East coast native Indians, that cleared oak tree forests as a hunting grounds, so completelly unrelated to the problem in California. The story was about native land rights and if such looking after their hunting grounds can be seen as claims on property rights, which Indians did not knew as a concept, so it is a moot point anyway.
The issues that plague CA seems to be chaos in organization level - from what I have read these wildfires are happening in the year, that did had moderate drought(compared to others), so I would look suspiciously in this with the mind, that if politicians are blaming climate, then it is a sign that they are absolutelly responsible for what they have not done and promised to people. But I do not own a house there and I have not voted for these people and I absolutelly would not hang them in the chimney of my house.
PS Also, there are many opportunists, that were burning their houses to receive insurance or compensations, so not all of those houses were burned by wildfires. It all looks ugly, regadless from what angle you look, because if there is no responsibility - even from the ones that have taken upon resposibility, then catastrophe is expected - sooner than later.
Yosemite NP, especially the iconic valley, looked vastly different when the Europeans first arrived in the nineteenth century. It was sparsely forested and had lots of meadows. After a 150 years of no controlled burns, it's a dense forest down there. It turns out the native peoples were managing the forest, after all.
The national park service does controlled burns in Yosemite and has for a couple decades at this point. You can argue they don't do enough but they're limited by bureaucracy, safe conditions, and manpower rather than willingness.
National parks are a small percentage of California’s land area. Does the state do controlled burns outside of the national parks? If not, national parks doing controlled burns do not do very much.
I thought that the idea that they did not understand property rights was a misconception. The different tribes had their own territories, and they clearly had an idea of the territory belonging to one or another. This is also why people negotiating with them for land would use underhanded negotiating tactics such as getting their leaders drunk for the negotiations so that they would agree to absurd deals. If they did not understand property rights, there would have been no point to doing that.
We had a lot of rain the last couple of years (before 2024), which got us out of severe drought for several years back into "moderate". 2024 has been QUITE dry, relatively speaking, but because of the previous years of a LOT of rain, it's only back to moderate drought status, AFAICT.
The years with lots of rain caused MUCH extra plant growth, and anyone who's been here a while expected several bad fires during our fire season in 2024 as the first "dry" year after a "wet" year. The fact that it's only been 1 major one and a few minor ones has actually been a bit of a surprise.
> The truth is that the rich diversity and stunning landscapes of places like Yosemite and other natural environments in the United States were intentionally cultivated by Native Americans for thousands of years. And their greatest tool was fire.
Wildfire structure losses can be mitigated with cutting firebreaks, building material selection and removing flammable trees and plants from properties. A lot of communities in western Canada have learned this the hard way.
Theory: Damages in the USA have gone up because mold mitigation was incorporated as a serious consideration only fairly recently. If you increase your definition of what damage is and the work required to fix it then 'damage occurring' will appear to suddenly go up.
How are you making this claim? Every time a hurricane hits Florida, there are photos of entire neighborhoods devastated by wind and storm surge. How many people were permanently displaced by Katrine? Etc. Maybe many of the homes weren't technically "destroyed", but each storm brings millions or billions in damage.
Hurricanes are common. The general case is they hit hundreds or thousands of square miles and destroy none or at worst a tiny fraction of the homes they hit.
Take Katrina from my friends and family living in New Orleans, you’ll find city streets where none of the houses go significantly damaged. They lost power long enough you don’t want to open the fridge, but most of the city was fine in the hardest hit city from one of the most expensive storms on record.
Moving the goalposts from destroyed to damaged gives different results.
The issue is most to the city only sustained water damage, a solid chunk of the city is above the water level and was absolutely fine. Moving outside the city most homes in Louisiana, Texas, Alabama etc don’t need to worry about flooding.
In most of South Florida basically anything left standing is pretty well built to withstand hurricanes.
A category 1 storm hitting NYC or North Carolina is an unbelievable disaster. A category 1 storm hitting Broward County is usually disruptive to everyday life but that’s it.
Hurricanes usually don't affect the structure of a house. They might damage the roof, parts of exterior cladding, perhaps windows, and the flooding which accompanies hurricanes destroys personal possessions, interior furnishing, electrical wiring, and appliances.
In the US, manual labor is very expensive, home construction or repair is highly regulated and requires permits and multiple inspections from the local government, and the amount of flood-destroyable stuff - material possessions, furnishings, appliances - in a typical home is massive. As a result, a cyclone which a poorer country would survive with a shrug in the US becomes an extremely expensive disaster.
It sounds like we're quibbling over the definition of "destroyed"... if a home is rendered uninhabitable for days/weeks/months, I'd consider that "destroyed" even if the framing is in fact salvageable.
And certainly as it relates to insurance, the trend sure seems to be well on it's way towards "coastal Florida is insurable" (either the price goes up beyond the means of the residents, or the insurers leave the market). Something like 5% of the state is covered by Citizen's Property (the government insurer of last-resort). Some coastal areas are ~10%. I have to imagine it won't be long before it's cheaper to pay people to move elsewhere than rebuild where they are.
adaptation to hurricane winds has largely been done in many parts of Florida; adaptation to storm surge is possible and some cities are beginning to.
the issue for Florida is that the state is made of permeable limestone, so it’s not possible to engineer around sea level rise. not so much an insurance issue exactly though, because it’s not a one-off disaster.
It's so interesting to see the people in awe of that "fire hurricane" video in L.A....
We had a way more intense drought than they in my city last year (theirs are not that intense). We also had 50 km/h winds. We also had higher temperatures... And all of those to levels that we never saw before. Also, we have more trees in our cities. We had new "fire hurricane" videos every week (normally, every other year somebody films one).
And we had to evacuate dozens of homes, luckily no one was destroyed and people could return 2 months later.
A Santa Ana wind is extremely dry and this one hit 100kmh (not 50). And it hasn’t really rained for 8 months (since May 2024). And we had a very wet winter last year, so there’s extra growth to fuel any fire. And finally, there’s 10 million people live in LA County, it’s a target rich space.
Please let me know where else is having the same sort of fire without destroying homes.
The 50 km/h was sustained, not peak, but ok, I don't think we reached 100.
We have 7 million people living around, and yeah, only 6 months without a single drop of rain (19X days, where I don't remember what X was). Fire often destroys some homes, we got luck last year.
Look, the annual fire disasters in California are not a normal thing.
If people just point out it's not normal, people complain that nowhere else has fire so nobody else understands the problem. If people point out similar places, looks like it's "Four Yorkshiremen-ing" (whatever that is). So, yeah, let it keep burning, whatever.
> What's the average monthly leccy bill in Phoenix during the summer? $400?
The average high temperature in Phoenix in July is 106.5F (41.4C). If you are cooling to 70.0F (21.1C), that's a difference of 36.5F (20.3C).
The average January low in Berlin is 28.0F (-2.2C). If you are heating to 65.0F (18.3C), that's a difference of 37.0F (20.5C).
I feel like many people living in climates that don't require air conditioning have this view that it's fantastically inefficient and wasteful. Depending on how you are heating (e.g. if you are using a gas boiler), cooling can be significantly more efficient per degree of difference. Especially if you don't have to dehumidify the air, as in Phoenix.
You’re ignoring one critical difference between these two scenarios. Humans, and all human related activities, produce heat as a waste product. It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it. Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
So every human in your cold space is 80W fewer watts of energy you need to produce to heat the space. But in a hot space, it’s an extra 80W that needs to be removed.
Add to that all of the appliances in a home. It’s not unusual for a home to be drawing 100W of electricity just keep stuff powered on in standby, and that’s another 100W of “free” heating. All of this is before we get to big ticket items, like hobs, ovens, water heaters etc.
So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper). But practically impossible to create a cool individual environment around a person. So in cold spaces you don’t have to heat everything up to same temperature for the space to be perfectly liveable, but when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space. Simply because all the waste energy created by people living in the space reduces the total heating requirement of the space, but equally increases the cooling requirement of that same space.
This simply is not true for a furnace or electric resistive heat.
My furnace produces 0.9W of heat for every 1W of energy input. More efficient ones do 0.98, the best you get with electric resistive heat is 1W.
On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
There’s a reason I say living space, I.e. a space with people living in it.
A living space will naturally heat itself with zero furnaces or electric heaters. Because the living things inside it will always produce heat (at least until they cease to be living). On the other hand, you’ll have a hard time getting living things to cool any space they occupy.
> On the other hand my air conditioner moves 3.5W of heat outside for every 1W of energy input.
Heat pumps work both ways, and it’s still easier to heat a space with a heat pump than cool it. Sure your AC can move 3.5W of heat for 1W of energy input. But that means 1W of energy allows you to remove 3.5W of heat from a space. But if you used the heat pump to heat the space, you would get 4.5W of additional heat, because that 1W of energy used to power the heat pump becomes waste heat that can be trivially captured and used to heat the space.
My AC works in both directions, in winter it moves more cold outside than the power it consumes. Not sure what the factor is exactly, but I think same as for cooling.
Those high COPs are probably for relatively small temperature deltas. Heat pumps get _less_ efficient when the temperature deltas are larger. See page 18 of the manual linked below for an example. As the temperature gets lower, the heating COP gets lower. The same should be the case with cooling (higher outdoor temperatures lead to lower COPs), but the data is not presented in the same way.
You are saying that heat pumps get less efficient when deltas are larger, and the parent post says they get more efficient when deltas are larger. In a sense, you're both correct.
There are multiple relevant temperatures for a heat pump, and the pump is more efficient when some of those are higher and some lower. A heat pump has two heat exchangers, one on the inside of the building and one outside. Each of those heat exchangers has two temperatures: the refrigerant loop temperature at that point, and the ambient temperature (air for air source heat pumps, ground for ground source heat pumps). There's also a fifth relevant temperature that has indirect influence: the setpoint (the desired indoor ambient temperature).
Efficiency increases when the temperature delta between the refrigerant and ambient temperatures is higher (both indoor and outdoor). But those temperature deltas vary inversely with the delta between the indoor and outdoor ambient temperatures.
So, in summary:
- Heat pumps get less efficient when the temperature delta between indoor and outdoor temperature is higher.
- They get more efficient when the temperature delta between refrigerant and ambient temperature is higher.
The net effect of this is that heat pumps become less efficient as the temperature becomes hotter outside in the summer and colder outside in the winter.
You can also think about it as far as actually moving heat. Cold is the absence of heat, and so when the air is colder, there is less heat moved for the same effort and you have to work harder -- less efficiently -- for the same amount of head to get moved.
"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space"
Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.
Add insulation, and use a heatpump. The more insulation you add the easier it easy to keep a space warm. Add enough insulation, and eventually the waste heat production from human activities inside the space will equal or surpass the heat loss through the insulation, removing the need for additional heating.
Insulation obviously also helps keep a place cool. But no amount of insulation will ever remove the need for cooling if the outside is warmer than the inside. Energy is always going to move from a hot place to a cold place, but at least insulation lets us control how quickly that happens.
Also the limit on air sourced heat pumps in cold conditions is basically caused by water freezing on the evaporator coils, effectively adding a layer of insulation that limits how much energy can be drawn from the air, we’re not really limited by the refrigerants. As other have mentioned you dig down to find a better source of heat, and often you don’t even need to dig far, a 20-30cm trench is often enough. Although in super cold climates you’ll need to go deeper to make sure your through the frost layer in the winter.
> "cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.
I thought any place that is significantly cold can still dig underground and at some point you can get enough heat to run your heat pump?
Yeah, if you have a bare minimum of 30k burning a hole in your pocket and enough open land to drill the well with the correct geology, and the larger your house the bigger/more wells you need as you're drawing from the Earth's relatively constant temperature. So the only way to get more heat is to get more surface area for the coolant.
Some people on reddit are reporting quotes of 125k for larger (>3000 sq ft) houses.
As someone who lives in a 4-season environment that can get down into the single digits F on occasion in the winter (forecast to be there for a couple of days next week), and has an air-source heat pump, I just suck it up and eat the $400-$500/month heating costs for the auxiliary (electric resistive) heat in Dec/Jan/Feb. If someone gifts me a ground-sourced heat pump I'll gladly accept, but I've got kids to raise so setting aside money for one is a long way off.
Heating is more costly if you use technology created for cooling. When you try to cool a cold space in order to heat hot space, you will have a bad time. You could use electric heater for heating, it should have no problems with heating, but will use more electricity. Or you could use something actually cheaper, like wood or fossil fuels. If you use more expensive method (like electricity) it will be more expensive.
This might be true for you. I have lived with free wood for heating and it was more expensive for me than using a heat pump. What is expensive depends on a lot of factors, political, social, location, time and knowledge. It is not a clear dollar per delta T.
Chopping up a tree is kind of fun, we bill that to the entertainment budget instead of the heating budget. And it usually happens during a hotter season, so I might have to go inside to take a break, get a cool drink. So, we can bill some of the tree chopping activity to the cooling budget!
The figure you are looking for is heating/cooling degree-days.
For each day, use the average high and the average low. Subtract the desired maximum dwelling temperature from the average high: if the result is positive, add it to the cooling degree-days total. Subtract the average low from the from the minimum dwelling temperature: if the result is positive, add it to the heating degree-days total.
Over a year, that gives you comparable figures on how much you will need to cool or heat the space. Many agencies calculate this for specific areas.
It is true that heat is easier to generate. Berlin is considered mild while Phoenix is considered very hot. They just happen to have the same temperature deltas. On the whole, the world spends many, many times more energy heating living spaces than cooling them. The coldest cities people live in just have much larger room temperature deltas than the hottest.
A lot of what you said is intuitively/directionally correct, but misses a lot of important physics related to heat transfer in buildings and operational questions of space heating equipment.
This is your most accurate/relevant point:
> All of this is ignoring the fact that it’s easy to create a tiny personal heated environment around an individual (it’s called a woolly jumper).
Whereas this is plainly wrong:
> It’s much easier, and consumes less additional energy, to heat an occupied space, than to cool it.
And then the following is correct but the marginal reduction in load is minimal except in relatively crowded spaces (or spaces with very high equipment power densities):
> Thanks to the fact that your average human produces 80W of heat just to stay alive.
The truth is it is generally easier to cool not heat when you take into account the necessary energy input to achieve the desired action on the psychrometric chart, assuming by “ease” you mean energy (or emissions) used, given that you are operating over a large volume of air - which does align with your point about the jumper to be fair!
Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation (simplified ELI5). It is only spending energy to move heat, not make it. On the other hand, a boiler or furnace or resistance heat system generally uses around 1 unit of input energy for every 0.8-0.9 units of heating energy produced. Heat pumps achieve similar to coefficients of performance as A/Cs, because they are effectively just A/Cs operating in reverse.
Your point about a jumper is great, but there are local cooling strategies as well (tho not as effective), eg using a fan or an adiabatic cooling device (eg a mister in a hot dry climate).
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space.
Once you move to cost, it now also depends on your fuel prices, not just your demand and system type. For instance, in America, nat gas is so cheap, that even with its inefficiencies relative to a heat pump, if electricity is expensive heating might still be cheaper than cooling per unit of thermal demand (this is true for instance in MA, since electricity is often 3x the price of NG). On the other hand, if elec is less than 3x the cost of nat gas, then cooling is probably cheaper than heating per unit of demand, assuming you use natural gas for your heating system.
Everyone seems to be making the same mistake here. As you say:
> Generally speaking, an A/C uses approx. 1 unit of electricity for every 3 units of cooling that it produces since it uses heat transfer rather than heat generation
You know you can use a heatpump to heat a space as well right? Then you get to move 3 units of heat into the space, plus you also get to use that extra unit energy used to power the heatpump, because the heatpump turns the unit of energy into waste heat! (After all energy can’t be destroyed, so it has to go somewhere).
Cooling takes less energy per BTU moved vs heating. In AC/heat pumps that's represented by SEER rating for cooling and HSPF rating for heating (heat pumps). Modern ACs have SEER ratings for 20+ and HSPF ratings for 8+. What it means is that on average, spending 1 BTU equivalent of electrical energy cools down the house by 20 BTU. Similarly for heat pump it means spending 1 BTU of electricity heats up the house by 8 BTU. Electric resistive heating is equivalent of HSPF 1.
Also in sunny climates it's easy to use solar energy for cooling making it carbon net-zero. Cold places typically burn natural gas for heating, it's much harder to make heating carbon net-zero.
You can use a heatpump for heating as well. Then not only do you get all the energy moved by the heat pump to warm a space. But you can also use the waste heat created by the heatpump for heating as well.
In a cooling scenario, all waste heat is just that, waste. But in a heating scenario, waste heat isn’t waste, it’s additional heat you can use, and reduces the total amount of energy you need to inject into the system.
This is a good point that I had not considered, and I will add a few additional thoughts:
* In cold weather, solar heat gain can work in your favor as well. Much of the effect will depend on the orientation, shading, and properties of your windows, though. On the other hand, as another commenter pointed out, more sun in southern, cooling-dominated climate can also mean more, cheaper electricity.
* If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
* At 65F (18.3C), most people I know would already be wearing a jumper/sweater. That's why I chose a lower target temperature for Berlin. The best source I could find[1] indicates that in November-December of 2022 (in the context of rising energy prices due to Russia's war with Ukraine), Germans actually kept their houses at 19.4C, on average.
* Maybe I'm moving the goalposts a bit, but I chose Berlin mostly because the numbers worked out conveniently. As someone who grew up in the American upper midwest, I wouldn't consider Berlin to be particularly cold. Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
> If you have a heat pump water heater, it will actually _cool_ your space significantly. The heat is transferred from your home to your water and mostly goes down the drain with it.
In a cold environment, you can just take that energy from outside. If you’ve got a heatpump, then you can always set it up make sure that waste heat produced can be used to heat a space, and make sure that it’s always scavenging energy from a place you either want to keep cool, or from outside.
> Phoenix, on the other hand, is the hottest city in the country and its summers are some of the hottest in the world. In general, the hottest cities are still closer to what we'd consider room temperature than the coldest are.
If we’re talking survivable environments here, then phoenix isn’t a good choice. Places like Delhi are better where not only are the temps high, but so is the humidity. At times hot enough and humidity enough that the wet bulb temperature rises higher than human survivable conditions, in which case, without heat pumps, it’s literally impossible for humans to survive more than a few hours.
There’s some element of comfort vs necessity here, I think… really, people could be keeping their houses at, like… 55F and they’d be totally fine. They just need to get acclimated to it.
On the other hand, depending on the humidity, heats over like 85F start becoming a health risk for some activities.
As someone acclimated to warmer weather, I disagree. People work outside in 85, 90, 95° weather without health problems all the time. Hydrate and your body will acclimate.
> So cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space
Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
In Alberta or Minnesota, where the delta in the winter can be as high as 60 degrees centigrade (-40 outside, +20 inside) but only 20 degrees centigrade at most in the summer (+45 outside, +25 inside), heating is far more costly. Even accounting for waste heat from appliances. Most heating is done with furnaces, not heat pumps. Air conditioners are heat pumps and are 3x as efficient as a furnace. There are also less energy intensive cooling methods - shading, fans, swamp coolers - commonly used in the developing world and continental Europe.
On the other hand in a place with warm winters and hot summers, such as south east Asia, obviously cooling is more expensive because heating is unnecessary.
The highest temperature ever recorded is around 60 degrees centrigrade, a mere 23 degrees above the human body. The low temperature record is like -90, 127 degrees below body temperature. Needing to heat large deltas is way more common than needing to cool high deltas. And cooling is done with heat pumps, which are more efficient than the technologies used most commonly for heating (resistive or combustion).
> when cooling a space, you have to cool everything, regardless of if it’ll impact the comfort of the occupants.
Keep the house at 25 degrees centigrade and run a ceiling fan. 23 if you're a multi-millionaire. You'll be far more comfortable outdoors if your house is closer to the outside temperature. The North American need to have sub-arctic temperatures in every air conditioned space in the summertime is bizarre (don't even get me started on ice water).
> Nope. That's precisely wrong. Tl;dr heating normally uses less efficient technology than cooling and has to work across a higher temperature difference.
That’s moving the goal posts. You can always use a heatpump to heat a space.
Any space you want to keep comfortable will always be easier if the outside is cooler than your target temperature. Everything in that space is going to produce heat as a natural consequence of expending energy into any form. It’s always possible to add insulation to minimise the amount of energy you loose into the surrounding environment, and you can always modulate how much additional energy you let escape using a simple opening in that insulation.
On the other hand, if the external space is hotter, then you must always expend additional energy to move waste heat energy accumulating in the space into the high energy space outside. There is no passive manner that can allow you to cool a space surrounded by a hotter space, you’re always fighting against the temperature gradient. And if you want your living, heat producing, organisms to keep living, then you need to get rid of the heat they produce.
I covered that in the rest of my post. Most of the time, heating involves a much bigger temperature gradient than cooling. And even though you can use a heat pump, most houses don't use one. (I love the tech personally). Meanwhile cooling always uses a heat pump, so almost every air-conditioned house is using more efficient tech than a heated house. While operating on a smaller temperature delta.
> There is no passive manner that can allow you to cool a space surrounded by a hotter space
Insulation works just as well to keep heat out as it does to keep heat in.
100%. And can be wonderfully done by efficient heatpumps that cover the warmer months too. Also nice correlation between hot and sunny areas which means solar can get you to net zero pretty quick. (Says man looking at his solar panels right now covered with snow.)
you cannot win this argument with the average person who lives in a chilly European country. it just does not compute.
there are whole important cultural lifeways related to opening and closing windows at proper times for efficient cooling and ventilation. these work really well — in Europe — and are treasured traditions.
getting people to accept AC is sort of like trying to convince the average American to go grocery shopping on a bicycle. some may accept the idea but only the most European influenced already.
Recently it was -7C where I lived. Even without heating, my indoor temp didn't go below 15C. In regions where cold temperatures are common, isolation and heat retaining materials are very common. Is preventing heat gain as simple as preventing heat loss?
Yes, insulation works both ways. My garage is unheated and insulated. If I go out there to work on something in the winter I always compare the temperature outside. On a sunny day it might be pleasant outside and freezing in my garage - so I'll open the door and let it warm up.
Insulation makes the house more resistance to temperature change (relative to the inside and outside).
One thing people forget is the delta is very different in the summer and winter. Lets say your thermostat is on 70 year round. If it is 100 degrees out you only have to cool 30 degrees. When it is 0 F out you have a delta of 70 degrees. So for this scenario, expect to use more energy in the winter.
Many of the gouses burning weren't built to current codes, but the cost to retrofit houses to code was insurmountable by any of the owners and apparently by the state or even the nation. So they will just wait for them all to burn and then rebuild them I guess?
There's plenty of water for Californians in California + The Colorado River.
The problem is that our government has spent ~100 years ensuring that corporations have easier and cheaper access to it so that they can grow feed for farm animals to sell overseas, largely to places like UAE that have sufficiently depleted their own water table as to make it impossible to grow alfalfa, thus worsening the risk of droughts for the sole benefit of the shareholders of these corporations.
Every gov't agency in the US needs to start treating our natural resources as if they belong to all the citizens of the country and not a select few shareholders of whichever corporation can earn the most money by exploiting them.
When European descendants started colonizing that part of the world they treated all the resources as free for the taking. You went into nature, developed some land for agriculture, and it became yours by right. The same with the water. It was essentially homesteading.
So water was treated as property the same way the land was. Whoever used it first, owned it. Leaving out the natives because apparently nobody cared about them, it made sense.
How we fix it now within that legal framework is the question.
Hey I'm trying to alleviate this issue from a technical standpoint and am trying to find others to join me. It's no cure-all, but the other paths would upend a century of legal precedence. Shoot me a PM if you're looking for work.
> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.
Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.
When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.
Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.
I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.
Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.
The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.
The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.
Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.
Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be, because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be damned).
The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).
What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your government does help fight that, but it's hard to completely stop it.)
Yes, people from the US always say concrete is expensive and wood is cheap. And unless you are designing a tent (by the way, zinc is way cheaper than wood for a tent), only people from the US say that.
There's something distorting your economy. Concrete is incredibly cheap as a material, extremely prone to use in a large supply chain, and requires way less labor than wood.
You make houses siting over finely built wood lattices... how much do you pay to the people building those? Because I can't imagine it being justifiable with Brazilian salaries.
What's the alternative? It's not particularly viable to just relocate an entire city.
Then there's the question of where to move them to. Between wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes you've eliminated most of the coasts. Much of the rest of the country defines its identity to a significant degree as being opposed to cosmopolitan cities. That doesn't leave a lot of places to move to even if we could just move the cities.
Japan has seismic activity, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides and flooding. Instead of building bunker houses they see homes as transient and utilitarian rather than as long-lasting investments. Perhaps homes in these high risks areas should be treated similarly.
Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc? It at least for me always detracts from the argument at hand. You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
Well, we are commenting on an article specifically about the spread of fire in urban areas, as we've seen in LA this week.
Here in the seismically stable UK, we had problems with fire spreading in urban areas [1] in 1666. So we banned wood exteriors on buildings. It works pretty well if you don't need to worry about earthquakes or hurricanes; brick doesn't burn.
This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Less about the question (that has been asked so much now its tiring) but more on how when people do ask it, they always ask in such a negative way. Its not why are so many homes built out of timber/wood but rather why are they built out of sticks?
There are two main ways to build a house out of wood. You can go for stick-built construction or timber framing. Homes in the US were mostly timber framed until the early 1900s. Advancements in tools and manufacturing techniques has resulted in stick-built homes becoming dominant in the US since then.
If you search for “stick-built” you’ll see pictures and encyclopedia articles describing it. The basic idea is that you take standard dimensional lumber (like 2x4s), bring it onto the site, and assemble it into the frame for the house. Timber construction uses larger pieces of timber to make the house.
I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners. If you tried to make a stick-built house in the 1800s it would fall apart, but this is the 2000s, and they make a million of them every year.
> I’m not an expert but it seems to me that stick-built construction took over the country because of advancements in fasteners.
The availability of engineered wood products like plywood is a big part of it too. Being able to attach what's effectively a solid sheet of wood to a wall adds a ton of shearing strength, for example. (And that's without getting into fancy modern engineered wood products like parallel-strand lumber or glulam, which give you something even better than raw wood.)
yes for sure stick framing is a term but thats not what people are talking about when they say the houses are built out of twigs, sticks or firewood. We are not talking about the building term of stick-framing.
I don't think the US has enough seismic activity to be much different. Chile and Japan do fine with solid construction and periodic 6-8 Richter earthquakes.
California is allegedly a seismic state within the USA and it rarely sees a 4 degree one, and when it happens it makes it to the US national news (and sometimes even to the news back home, but as a comedy break because people don't even think about getting out of bed if it's not a 6).
I'm not sure about hurricanes, but maintenance can't be much different as rotten wood and moldy bricks are both a problem. Maybe insulating bricks is more expensive?
> This lesson is taught in history classes to 10 year olds, and they don't tend to go into other countries' construction traditions, or reasons not to use bricks.
Cultural differences don't help here, in the US people think about rebuilding homes way more often than people in Europe, so there's this mindset that the home doesn't need to last that long because it will be rebuilt anyways. This shorter life span, "freedom" and profits thanks to lower costs also call for little regulation that forces the building code to aim to survive the regional disasters from the past 60+ years. California's fire code is probably an outlier, but SF had to burn down for the regulation to come out.
I think you underestimate the frequency, strength, and geographic distribution of strong earthquakes in the US. There is nothing comparable in Europe. You have to engineer for the strongest earthquake, not the average one, and on the US west coast that is M8-9+ depending on the specific location. The construction techniques in Japan and US are very similar because both have similarly extreme earthquakes.
The entire western third of the US is has several M7+ earthquakes per century, with a M6 every couple years, and the occasional M8-9+. The 1964 Anchorage earthquake was stronger (M9.2) than the 2011 Japanese earthquake that caused the great tsunami.
In the eastern US, there is a giant seismic zone that had multiple M8+ earthquakes in the 19th century. These were so powerful they changed the path of the mighty Mississippi River. People forget about it because it hasn’t had a large earthquake in over a century.
A lot of R&D is done on new construction techniques for extreme earthquake risks. The challenge with reinforced concrete is the absurd amount of reinforcement and steel you need to make it survive an earthquake that strong, which makes construction slow and expensive. The state-of-the-art doesn’t use reinforced concrete at all, even in skyscrapers; they use specially designed welded steel plates and fill the empty spaces with poured concrete.
The US has an anomalously high exposure to natural disasters as an accident of geography. For example, people often forget just how many active volcanoes there are in the US, including multiple super-volcanoes. While I live in an area well-known for its M9+ earthquake and tsunami risk, I can see three active volcanoes from my kitchen window.
Right, Europe has little seismic activity, so the rare 4M_W earthquake takes down random 400yo buildings easily.
My point was that building with bricks was not a problem, Japan and Chile build houses and skyscrapers just fine.
> I think you underestimate the frequency, strength, and geographic distribution of strong earthquakes in the US
Sir, I'm from Chile. Beyond earthquakes in Alaska the US is no match, and that land it's not even close to the US. I promise you the Danish construction code has not been heavily influenced by Greenland.
One huge problem with respect to fire resistance, in American home's, are the use of truss connector plates. While they have many advantages in cost and allow impressive cheap big houses, they fundamentally weaken the wood when it burns. Often houses just collapse on that joints, not because the overall beam failed, but this interface. In the end the use of "wood" is blamed, but that failed to address the rootcause.
For me it's the result of pent-up anger from the popularity of drywall and particle board here in the US.
It's not a big leap to go from complaining about the furniture and the walls being made from what seems like highly compressed dust to also complaining that underneath it all is a bunch of sticks.
I don’t understand the sense of entitlement towards every nuclear family owning a building constructed with stone, steel, and concrete. None of these things are available in a level of abundance to grant them to every person alive. While concrete only construction is more common in developing countries I certainly question the quality. I lived in an apartment like this in South Asia and it had no weather insulating ability whatsoever, the plaster was constantly crumbling, and the doors would jam up. Not to mention the recurring nearby stories of an apartments roof collapsing on its occupant.
I am thankful to live in a county where land and building ownership are more available to the common man than most and many people can escape being perpetual renters. Wood construction enables that. Plus North Americans love to adjust and remodel their homes and have unique shapes with high ceilings etc etc etc which is really helped with our construction techniques. The only thing I hate is termite risk and that could probably be resolved by allowing framing with pressure treated wood
It helps with availability of materials if people don't expect to have like 500sqft per person. But that's not how modern houses are built in US, at least not in my neck of the woods (Seattle suburbs). As for the quality of housing, I'm from ex-Soviet satellite state and lived in a prefab apartment block - yeah, it was a bit dated but no major problems with quality that I could tell. The main nuisance was lack of acoustic insulation.
Southern California would like to chat. They’re so pervasive here that the fumigation chemicals used are one of the states largest greenhouse gas emissions.
> You could just as easily build a wood framed home with an exterior shell that is fire resistant using modern materials or brick.
That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed. They are pre-fabbed timber frames with a brick facade. It's quite common for British people to be snobby about building materials. I wonder how many don't realise their house is timber framed.
> That is actually how pretty much all new houses in the UK are constructed
This claim struck me as unlikely, so I did a quick fact check.
Accroding to the most recent report I could find[1]: "Figures from the National House Building (NHBC) suggest that timber frame market share has developed from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2021 and that market conditions, as described above, present the opportunity for this to develop to circa 27% by the end of the forecast period (2025)"
This appears to be driven by Scotland where 92% of new builds were timber framed in 2019, while in England (where the majority of new houses are built) it was just 9%.
Dimensional lumber is often called sticks, in the building industry, probably because it's quicker. For example, if a roof is built from individual pieces of dimensional lumber, instead of pre-built trusses, the building method isn't called dimensional-lumber-built but stick-built.
Brick, stucco, concrete siding are all fire resistant and commonly used in construction in the last 25 years.
Insulation plays into combustability as well, where mineral / rock wool has thermal mass, does not ignite, but us construction has recently favored fiberglass and cellulose for the the costs.
Some of us live in reinforced concrete socialist-built apartment buildings, and our homes don't burn like american houses do. Same for single family houses made from brics and cement (most houses here)
Same for eg. gas explosions, this is one one looks like in us:
Same for eg floods, pump the basements and ground levels, repaint, move stuff back in. Someone from US I work with on a project had a pipe burst while on vacation, and insurance wrote off their whole house, because of a few days of water.
I mean, sure, you could that, but looking at the photos from fire-affected areas, nobody did that, it's all burnt to the ground.
I think you missed the point. Its the same as me asking about the drab prisons you live in. Not to mention your cherry picked examples don't really hold up. A 2500sqft home filled with natural gas has a different explosive potential than a small apartment. I am also not sure it makes sense to build homes expecting for a natural gas explosion, not even a measurable risk. You can absolutely build a home that is fire resistant which most modern homes in fire risk areas are.
Even single family homes are built from bricks and cement. Even large ones.
It's not just gas explosion, it's 'everything', fire, structural rigidity (only ground floor houses are rare, almost non existant here), and well.. they're built to last.
I am not sure what built to last means and not sure if evidence exists that it makes much different over multiple generations. Those SFH built to last as you would say, will still undergo major renovations as technology improves and tastes change. Certainly when in areas that are prone for specific types of disasters, there should be designs to minimize risk but again that happens in the US but often (not always) these major disasters play out in areas of risk but the even is black swan compared to history.
>Honest question. Why when people describe wood framed homes do they always phrase it like houses made from "firewood", "sticks", "twigs" etc?
Europeans are jealous that they clearcut all their forests 1000 years ago and want to brag up their cinderblock homes that no one can actually afford to buy anymore. 40% down on their 50 year mortgages yadda yadda.
Japan is probably not a good comparison for home insurance because houses in Japan typically only have a 20 to 30 year lifespan. After that they are usually torn down and a new house is built.
Home values in Japan are somewhat anomalous. There are some good policies that contribute to this, but also other factors that make me reluctant to generalize from Japan. It’s a country with declining natural population, where houses are assets that rapidly decline in value to the point where they’re nearly worthless not that long after you buy them.
Average home age in Japan is 30 years. I think, maybe once or twice, I’ve lived in a building less than 30 years old in the US. I’ve spent most of my life in buildings built pre-war. There aren’t so many pre-war buildings in Japan, but the US takes the blame for that one :-(
Why would anyone tear down a 20 year old house? Where I live the houses are 80-100 years old and they’re better built and nicer to live in than most newer homes.
The traditional materials used in Japanese construction of everyday homes aren't really in the "built to last" category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1DP5xpM3Y8 . In some cases, trying to make a house that was resistant to floods, fires and earthquakes at the same time would have been prohibitively expensive. I'm sure that led to forming habits that have continued into more modern eras of building styles where it's less required.
They're also smaller, which makes construction costs cheaper which means people are more likely to make dramatic changes when fashion changes. And then there's more of a culture of prefab house building rather than extensions etc. Planning is also a lot more liberal which allows the rebuilt house to be more different and also reduces the cost of the process.
I think even in Europe some of the older houses are houses of theseus though. The exterior shell is the same, but there's plenty of buildings in the local city centre that were tenements, then small business offices, then apartments, with significant remodeling that occurred. Or the house I used to live in was built in the 1880s, extended in the 1950s and significantly modernised in the 2000s. Each time there would have involved largely gutting the interior and rebuilding.
Interesting, thanks! The regulatory explanation makes a lot of sense- I once tried to pull a permit to install a ceiling fan in a small USA town, and it was a nightmare.
Basically houses in Japan are treated like cars -- as something that doesn't appreciate in value as in most places but rather depreciate over time. Some of this is maybe cultural from the time when houses in Japan were literally constructed with paper.
That is a fascinating cultural perspective and explains a lot of things to me:
I've always treated cars like houses are in the USA- I buy an older higher end car like a Porsche, keep it in perfect shape, and expect it to appreciate- and it does. Most cars I've owned I ultimately sold for much more than I paid. I've never understood why anyone would waste money on a depreciating car, especially when a fully depreciated high end car is so much nicer and cheaper than a low end new one. Airplanes are not mechanically that different than a car, yet generally last and hold value if maintained.
I've also never understood why people in the USA assume houses will always appreciate, as if it is a law of nature or something- when at its core houses can't appreciate forever relative to inflation, because there is a hard cap somewhere below people paying 100% of income for housing. This basically proves it is just a combination of a culture that values older housing in the USA and regulatory capture preventing new construction. New houses are often seen as "cold," "sterile," or "lacking character" in the USA- and the stereotype of a successful wealthy person is in a giant old mansion.
I suspect it might have something to do with the prevalence of earthquakes, the likelihood of said structures being damaged in earthquakes, and building codes (I've heard) that require re-building on a regular basis.
When you build you civilization on active volcanoes having long-lasting buildings may not be a reasonable assumption.
And, yes!, they have insurance. So if you can insure buildings in volcano country, you can insure anything, anywhere, maybe?
I could but I won’t… do you think I asked that question because I urgently need accurate data on Japanese housing? Why does anyone join forums, or discuss things with friends in real life when they could just Google things?
Do we know why the insurance companies can't simply raise the insurance price to match the risks in those areas that are prone to natural disasters? I mean in general, not as in California where the government imposes strange policies. Speaking of the policy, why wouldn't California allow the insurance company raise the premium by region? Doesn't such policy benefit the rich at the cost of the poor as the rich love to live by the hills, lakes, or beaches, which is very much against the ideology of California?
California's ideology is to protect at all costs the people who already live among its hills, lakes, and beaches. Insurance and property tax hikes are threats insofar as they could drain your wealth. The (other, new) rich are a threat insofar as they could become your neighbors and ruin the view. The state protects you in both directions.
Re: California, I don't understand the context for your question, or why you would think the California government is more strange than any other US state government. There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
tl;dr, though: California does allow insurers to do that, but is using currently an antiquated set of rules that don't allow for modern risk management approaches. It's been rewriting those rules recently to fix this; I think the new rules are supposed to be in effect starting this year.
It was based on some reports (or podcast? I can't remember) that the California government didn't allow the insurers to sufficiently increase their premiums in the burnt areas. The government (or the insurers) cited two reasons: there was a rule that the annual increase should be no more than 7%, and that if they want to make an exception then the insurers must increase the premiums for all the insured areas instead of setting the price by risk. As a result, the insurers stopped insurance renewal for about 60% of the burnt properties. I assume the intention is to protect the insured or to ensure certain equity, hence the use of the term "ideology". FWIW, it thought it was a neutral term, implying that it's a strongly held fundamental belief.
California's insurance policies are more strange, due to proposition 103, passed in 1988.
It creates a condition where the state can prohibit insurers from selling to residents, if it doesn't like their prices, which has recently lead to a lot of insurers no longer selling in the state, as construction prices in the state have risen significantly faster than inflation, leading to insurance premiums that the state doesn't like.
Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers.
> Residents who no longer have any insurers available can buy insurance from the state, but its far more expensive than the plans it rejected from private insurers
In fact, a huge loss, which it plans to subsidize by... billing any insurers remaining in the state.
> As of last Friday, the FAIR Plan had just $377 million available to pay claims, according to the office of Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California. It’s not yet known how much in claims the plan will face but the total insured losses from the fires so far has been estimated at as much as $30 billion.
> If the FAIR Plan doesn’t have enough money to pay all its claims, it can rely on something called reinsurance — effectively, insurance for insurers in case their losses exceed a certain amount.
> Senator Padilla’s staff said the plan has $5.75 billion in reinsurance available.
Notably, $5.75B is less than $30B.
> If the FAIR Plan can’t make up its losses from reinsurance alone, it can demand money from California’s insurance companies to make up the difference.
California's a rich state; $30B isn't totally beyond what they could extract from local industry in a year. I'm sure they'd prefer to be bailed out, but as a non-California taxpayer, I'd want any federal bailout to come with conditions that would help prevent recurrence: restricting building in dangerous areas, requirements around relaxing SFH zoning in safe areas so that developers can infill housing and meet CA's housing needs.
> There's no universally-accepted "ideology of California." It's a big state with a huge, diverse population.
Population is diverse and large, yes, but the state government (including the insurance commissioner) is radically biased left/progressive and has been for decades.
Spain just had the worst flooding ever, Australia has massive wildfire issues, coastal areas all over the world are flooding, inland areas are dealing with drought. It's definitely not just the US.
The problem is liability, to an extent; if you imagine a perfect market system, then maybe it would fix climate change; the parties responsible would be on the hook to pay for their externalities, so would be incentivised to stop producing them. In the real world, ah, not so much, though I do wonder if we'll see insurers/reinsurers attempting to sue big CO2 emitters in the near future.
>don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires
Fireproof concrete bunkers would be worse for insurance because when the firestorm blows through and shatters the 7-centimeter windows slits your fireproof design calls for and ignites the interior you have to demolish steel reinforced concrete with machinery instead of knocking down wood with a sledgehammer and muscles.
A Caterpillar D9 is more expensive per day than a migrant laborer.
There are so many images of concrete buildings being burned out that if I search "california fires" the 9th image is of a steel-reinforced concrete building has ~10 meter fire jets blowing out one of its windows.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in here is the ornamental planting of non-native plants all over LA, like eucalyptus which is highly flammable, as opposed to the native coastal oak, which is not. All those iconic, non-native palm trees are fire hazards.
That's because that wasn't a material effect in this situation. It was hurricane force winds blowing over native shrubs and scrub land. It wasn't forests of eucalyptus that caused this. California has a decades long effort to restore native plants in areas. Eucalyptus groves are being torn out. The problem is that the native shrubs and grass are pretty flammable. They evolved to burn and regrow. They aren't resistant.
For sure, they're not fireproof of course, but they do survive and seem to be more resistant than non-native species [1].
And, like all things, of course there are many interdependent pieces in play, like those hurricane force winds, but oak trees don't burn the same as a palm [2]. I just keep seeing that viral video of a firefighter trying to put out a palm while a guy escaped his house on a bike -- it was shedding embers like crazy. [3]
A key issue in the LA fires was bad management at all levels of government that could have prevented an order of magnitude of the damage (If procedures from the past were followed).
1. Santa Ynez Reservoir right above Palisades was empty for the past year, depriving fire hydrants of water. (State incompetence)
2. La City defunded fire department removing 100 fire trucks from service due to maintenance. (City Incompetence)
3 Severe fire warnings reported days in advance of the fire. Rather than take precautions and position fire trucks and equipment etc as was done in the past, the Mayor flew off to Ghana. (City Incompetence, Fire Department incompetence (but partly because of cut budget)
4. Forest maintenance has been stopped. (State incompetence)
Competent management is needed or even worse can be expected in future.
1. Santa Ynez may have helped, however (a) you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir, but more critically (b) the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry and (c) Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.
2. 'defunded' -> about a 2% reduction. Also it's not 100 fire engines, 100 appartus, which covers ambulance, command cars, etc, and it's not clear what exactly is waiting for maintainence.
3. The Mayor doesn't drive fire engines. LAFD and LACoFD prepositioned according to their models, per the chief.
4. most of the LA fire wasn't forest, but chaparral, which is lower, scruby-er, brushy-er terrain. It tends to burn on a 30-50 year cycle, but burning too much more often destroys the ecoology entirely. Indeninous practice and some research[1] suggest small patch-burning; others (NPS) avoid prescribed burns in chaparral in favor of natural fire and structure defense. So it's not clear that there's an unambiguously better management practice than "its gonna burn sometime" combined with aggressive brush clearance and defense around structures.
re: 2/3 Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment. But the specific complaints are ticky-tacky at best, and (AFAIK) no one asserts that a differnt pre-deployment, or a few more engines in service would have changed anything but the margins. I will say LAFD letting their first shift go off-duty as scheduled while LACoFD kept their shift on is an unfortunate unforced error.
re: 4 USFS (and maybe Cal Fire too? not sure). did halt prescribed burns in October 24 in the face of opposition on liability and air quality grounds. Hopefully the LA fires drive people to reconsider their resistance to prescribed burns, and creates the necessary risk-bearing structures for Cal Fire and USFS to actually perform them.
Not sure why you would want to make excuses for management incompetence.
Do you agree that if Santa Ynez reservoir had been full as it should have been, that there would have been no issues with fire hydrant water flowing for the Palisades?
Also, do you agree that in the case of private providing of water during the fire, that an entire mall was saved because of that? [1]
Do you agree that a mayor who promised during the election that she would not travel out of country, that then does travel out of country after extreme fire warnings, is not ideal?
I don't care about Bass. She has no role to play in an emergency besides telling the LAFD chief 'go fight the fire with all available resources' LAFD wasn't even the largest fire department responding, and we haven't heard a peep about LACoFD or the county supervisors.
> If the reservoir had been full
>> you're still limited by the flow rate of the main to withdraw from the reservoir
>> the situation was already well out of hand before any hyrdants ran dry.
To expand for your benefit, they were 6-8 hours into the firefight before the hydrants became an issue and ~15-17 hours in before the tanks were fully exhausted.
>> Eaton had so such issues with hydrants, but a substantially similar outcome.
So no, I don't think water supplies supply made a difference at all. If you have the people, and the apparatus to dedicate to wholly one structure, you probably can save it. The actual firefighters were simultaneously fighting hundreds of house fires while a linear hurricane blew it all further and and further down the hill. They had to make the deploy the (region's worth of) resources had they could in the face of an awful situation that would have overwhelmed a state's worth of firefighters.
> Water is quite important ... Why spin this
Please engage with the reality of the situation instead of the simplified fantasy you've imagined in its place.
> why you would
Because I started seeing these talking points on night of the 7th. Certain factions were and are absolutely thrashing to attach blame anyone and anything they previously disliked. There are policy lessons to take from this disaster. LACoFD and LAFD need to be bigger, we need much more brush clearance, we need fewer NIMBYs to complain about the smoke from prescribed burns, ... the list goes on. But these real, essential changes are not shaped like 'one simple trick to stop the LA fires' or a getting gotchas all the woke dem pols.
Hmm, you think the mayor defunding the fire department had no role to play in this?
Don't you find it curious that the mall to fully survive the fire without damage had private fire fighters with water? [1] Doesn't this imply that had the FD had water they could have prevented damage?
>> If you have the people, and the apparatus to dedicate to wholly one structure, you probably can save it. The actual firefighters were simultaneously fighting hundreds of house fires
> had the FD had water
>> they were 6-8 hours into the firefight before the hydrants became an issue and ~15-17 hours in before the tanks were fully exhausted.
To elaborate further for you, that means a huge portion of the damage took place before hydrants were an issue. Furthermore once there was an issue, the professional firefighters had the same exact same sort of mobile water tankers supplying them as the private company you mentioned. No professional firefighter has indicated that more water availability would have materially changed the situation.
> defunded
>> about a 2% reduction [YoY].
>> Los Angeles (City mostly, but also County) clearly need a bigger fire department, with more people, stations, and equipment.
Elaborating, in general I think Crowley and Park are completely correct, that LAFD staffing should have kept better pace with population growth. That's a much broader and more diffuse problem though - that of the FD being able to keep up with their day-to-day mission.
However, even if LAFD had kept pace, and therefore was 50% bigger than it is currently, that doesn't substantially increase the response. LAFD is already not the largest FD in the area, and the mutual aid system pulled in LACoFD and many surrounding FDs. A 50% larger LAFD increases the size of the response by <<50%. In the morning after the Eaton fire, one of the commanders outlined the problem thus: a typical structure fire needs multiple engines for multiple hours. Fighting every concurrently structure fire would have demanded thousands of engines - in his estimation more engines than exist in the state, nevermind in Los Angeles and neighboring counties.
So on the specific point: of course -2%YoY funding shifts the margin slightly, and Crowley is right to complain that every dollar will shift the margins of the department's capability, and of the day-to-day mission will feel the shift in margins. But no counterfactual policy choice short of "we spend the next 3 years' revenue on fire engines, and put them outside every home in the city" shifts the margin enough to make a difference to disaster of the scale experienced. So no, one responding FD cutting its budget by 2% played ~no role in the outcome.
--
If you're not just trolling, or here to push whatever view you currently hold, please take a few minutes to understand what actually happened in these fires, and the realities of the situation on the ground. Stop looking for gotchas and start looking for solutions.
re: point #1, the fire command team captain himself refuted this disinformation in an interview with Musk.
I don't know about the other three offhand, but it's absurd to claim that state and local governments in California are somehow not taking fire risk seriously. Do you seriously think that the state that has annual wildfire season just happens to be "incompetent" when it comes to preparing for wildfires?
How does the statement of "not taking fire risk seriously" explain the fact that the Santa Ynez Reservoir was and still is empty, and is a primary uphill source of water for those fire hydrants, or that the mayor defunded the fire department and left for Ghana after getting extreme fire danger warnings?[1]
Because Santa Ynez was empty (for the past year), water was supplied from downhill water sources and the pressure needed dropped off to the point there was no longer any water out of the hydrants.
Look, it's known that reservoir was empty, but it's a covered reservoir. You're looking at the the _cover_. That image tells you nothing about the state of the reservoir at the time.
> primary uphill source of water for those fire hydrants
was 3x 1M gallon water tanks. Hydrants were gravity fed until the tanks ran out (8-15 hours into the firefight), at which point water tankers supplied responding companies.
I'm asserting that anybody saying anything has nothing to do with the actual facts. I just offered you a 2025 aerial view of the reservoir designed to provide water at pressure to hydrants that is empty, for example. The Fire Chief warned about the effects of the defunding. [1]
This is nonsense disinformation. Citations? This wasn't a forest fire so forest management isn't an issue. California makes massive investments in wild lands maintenance. It hasn't "stopped". Also most forest land in California is Federally owned. Perhaps our incoming president will invest some money in maintaining the peoples forests. This disaster deserves better responses.
I'm not sure what you mean about forests not involved: "The fire was first reported at about 10:30 a.m. PST on January 7, 2025, covering around 10 acres (4.0 ha) of the mountains north of Pacific Palisades" [1]
California spending money has nothing to do with the outcomes in reality.
I imagine they're rejecting the word "forest" to describe the landscape there. Locals would reserve the word "forest" for the coniferous zone of much higher elevation mountains. For example, the fire that destroyed Paradise, California some years ago was what we would all consider a forest fire.
The wild areas near Malibu and Pacific Palisades are more a mixture of chaparral and hilly grassland. There may be some oak trees scattered about, but it feels like more trees exist in the private home landscaping than in the actual wild areas.
Coming from the UK, increased flooding has been an issue for 20+ years and still it's a bit taboo to maybe say it's climate change to older generations
> nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.
The alternative is to build quadruple-the-price houses out of brick in an area prone to earthquakes.
It's much easier to repair/replace the former. And theoretically would be easier to avoid, if the fed would clean up the brush wood in their land (or give it back to the state, so they can manage it).
As for the hurricanes, stop allowing builders to build SFH in areas that are at or below sea level. They're going to flood. Period. That's not sustainable from an insurance perspective.
There were houses that survived recent wildfires because they were built to be in a fire zone and survive fires. I’m sure there was damage but nowhere near total loss.
I’m sure when homes are rebuilt the majority will not be fire resistant.
It’s possible to build for hurricanes and floods too but few do it. They build houses that get blown away and then tap insurance.
Insurance rates for properties not built to withstand the stresses of their environment will go up.
we had a huge wildfire in my area in 2021 that burned through a few small towns. In one town, the only houses that survived where the ones that followed the guides out there for creating defensible space. They were also newer homes, which is obviously easier then retro-fitting an existing home, but the town got rebuilt essentially the same as it was, which is kind of sad to see.
I'm always baffled at the fact that Americans don't build houses out of bricks.
I read those arguments of the advantages this method has, especially financial ones, but to me it's nonsense considering that it would prevent an endless number of problems that cause the total loss.
I still remember when New Orleans was hit with by Katrina, large parts of the suburbs where houses where made by wood and plastic where destroyed, yet downtown where buildings where made of bricks required maintenance, sometimes little of it, but none faced a total loss.
Unreinforced masonry is illegal in most of California and extremely dangerous- every brick becomes a projectile in an earthquake.
Despite the news coverage, fires are extremely rare but nearly every home in these areas is guaranteed to face multiple massive earthquakes that would bring down a brick building.
In cusco basin in Peru spanish colons realized their brick made building were falling down at every earthquake. They also realized incas building made of thin walls built on top of large stones that can move relative to each others during an earthquake were resisting much better. They then decided to reuse the foundations of incas buildings and put their brick build constructions on top of it to have earthquake resistant building.
Earthquake resistant constructions made of stones have been known for centuries by the incas and probably other civilizations without having building entirely made of wood, why can't californians?
I don’t know but do they have ~7.9 earthquakes like California? I’ll bet they were not multi story homes with vaulted ceilings, giant glass windows with tons of natural light, and efficient insulation?
Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake resistant… it is an appropriate material for the area despite a slightly higher fire risk.
You can also look at some states like Chiapas in Mexico. There are daily earthquakes in Tuxla. Last 8.2 was in 2017 in Tapachula. They typically live in small building made of mud bricks and stones.
https://earthquakelist.org/mexico/chiapas/#all-latest-earthq...
In practice, it is probably impossible to innovate on housing materials in California- I doubt you could get a permit or insurance, which is a shame.
Plus, I and most people wouldn't personally want to buy a any type of stone or brick house- it would take a lot of evidence to convince me it was earthquake safe, and I'm not sure how one could produce such evidence. Resale value and demand would be very low for something unusual.
Wood houses in practice aren't a big problem. There is something like a 3% chance per century of a wood house burning down in California, and almost all of those are centered on specific locations that are known to be very high risk and can be avoided if desired.
In most cases you would escape safely and be covered by insurance (neither of which would be the case with a stone house in an earthquake). In California almost everyone has fire insurance, almost nobody can get earthquake insurance. Probably if a stone house was in a large fire, it would still be burned to bare walls and still be as unlivable and expensive to rebuild.
The entire west coast sits on top of a fault line. That’s why people don’t build with brick here. There’s plenty of brick buildings on the east coast (and on the west coast like in Oregon, but they have to be seismically retrofitted which is expensive).
I never understood this. We build in Europe, over earthquake-risk zones, with bricks and steel and we follow rules to make them earthquake resistant. It is not a problem anymore since like the 1980. We now have also methods to make old and very old brick buildings earthquake resistant without demolishing them
It works fine for commercial buildings and multi-family structures here too , there’s even a ton of brick buildings in Oregon (which are currently being retrofitted), but not as well for single family homes because of the cost.
There’s a lot of historical context to understand here. The neighborhood that just burned down in the Eaton fire (Altadena), was built up by African Americans and Latinos who were redlined out of Pasadena even after desegregation. Some of them built their houses on land that they bought for under $100 in the 1950s and 60s. They wouldn’t have been able to afford the kind of construction they’d need to be both earthquake and fire resistant. Their choice was between owning an old tinderbox or renting from slumlords.
What? What earthquake zone in Europe is similar to the fault lines in California? We are talking about entire cities wiped out by earthquakes just 120 years ago.
There’s a plate boundary running under Morocco and across the Mediterranean, but it’s not nearly as active as the Pacific Rim, and it’s quite a long way from Northern Europe.
Bricks have to be manufactured and transported. In denser countries, the transportation cost is lower and there is a factory near you. In the US, you’re damn well sure you can find timber, the US is loaded with timber.
Brick also isn’t some magical building material that solves all your problems without drawbacks. Wood isn’t some evil building material that creates a bunch of problems without benefits.
Newer multistory is typically cast in place with rebar reinforcement from what I can tell.
In the countryside, you might find more masonry block construction, but not in dense urban areas like Taipei and Taichung where the norm is to build up. Most "single family homes" are what we would consider very large condos in the US.
I don't get how can one put his own future in a cheaply built building you're one fire or thougher-than-usual natural event away from losing.
It's normal nobody wants to insure such risky assets, especially as nominal value of this wooden crap is stellar due to the skewed demand/offer ratio plaguing good parts of US.
In my life I've seen my and my family's real estate being hit by a tree, fire, floodings and I've never had to face anything close to a total loss.
Huge expenses? Sure. But never anything close to a loss.
The only thing that could put my real estate on a serious risk are earthquakes, I guess that's a scenario where lighter built houses would have instead an advantage.
This is less like "well, I could get the $10 pants and have to replace them in a few months, or the $70 pants and have them last a decade" sort of cheap, and more the "well, I've been saving a mortgage down-payment for 15 years in the top 30% of individual wage earners, and this is the best built house I can afford" kind.
The options are either pay more for this one thing than literally any other possession you or anyone you know will ever own, or live in a tent or worse.
I feel like criticizing people for pragmatism in the face of (literally) existential threats is some kind of next-level privilege.
If you built a home out of bricks in New Orleans it will sink. Same (and even worse) for Florida. You can mitigate that somewhat but it's extremely expensive and bad for the environment/water table/aquifer.
For reference, to make a non-sinking, heavy building in Florida you have to drill down into the limestone layer which is usually 100+ feet below the surface. Then you have to create very strong concrete caissons to hold the building up, standing on that limestone layer. It's very similar to if you were to build a structure out into the ocean (LOL).
I mean, the answer is obviously no as long as you allow insurance prices to rise accordingly. Insurance is always possible if you pay the right price for the given level of risk/cost; if you can't afford the insurance, you can't afford the risk.
A significant portion of human structures are located close to the coast (seaborne trade having been a huge enabler of economic development for a few hundred years) and are exposed to flooding from rising sea levels, or built in valleys that are increasingly at risk from flooding due to far-above-long-term-historic-norms precipitation runoff (higher atmospheric temps lead to more energy in weather systems; see eg massive floods in Europe in the past few years).
Compared to the other challenges climate change poses those are fairly simple engineering problems. The Netherlands manage fine with large parts of the country below sea level.
You’re ignoring things like the geological conditions in the Netherlands, they have very peaty soil which is fairly impermeable to water. Which makes the task of keep the sea back pretty easy, you just build a big wall.
But if you look in places like Florida, the ground conditions there are substantially more porous. If you try to keep the sea back there with a simple wall, it’ll just flow under the wall through the soil. You would have to dig all the way to bedrock and install some kind of impermeable barrier to prevent most of Florida from flooding due to sea level rise. Something that’s unbelievably cost prohibitive to do.
The Netherlands only exists below sea level because their ground conditions meant it was possible to pump out the country using technology available in the 1740s. If the ground conditions weren’t basically perfect for this kind of geo-engineering, the Netherlands simply wouldn’t exist as it does today.
You’re using an example that exists purely as a result of survivorship bias, as an argument that it’s practical to apply the same techniques or achieve the same outcomes anywhere else. Completely ignoring the fact that your example only exists because a unique set of geologic conditions made it possible, and those conditions are far from universal, and not in anyway correlated with places we humans would like to protect.
The Netherlands has been planning for the impacts of sea-level rise for decades now. At least twenty years ago the government broached the idea (with TV commercials) that they were going to have to abandon some are areas to the sea.
A few critical ingredients being: no denialism about their vulnerability, strong social and economic commitment to reducing vulnerability, lack of reflexively blaming floods on illegal immigrants or trans people
and sea level rises are slow enough that countries with more high ground than The Netherlands can just not rebuild/maintain old houses in vulnerable positions and build higher (often just a bit further in) instead.
Some buildings buy the coast (especially in port cities) and have steep rises anyway.
There is a huge threat of cultural loss - e.g. Venice.
Said the American living in a log cabin in Montana. But if you're from, say, Tuvalu, or Venice, the 15cm rise of the last decades is definitely noticeable, and the trend has no reason to stop or decrease.
Sea level naturally varies (if we define it liberally). It's at the times of maximums - high tide plus storm surge - we notice, otherwise it's easy to miss.
But when those high tides plus storm surges hit, we really notice sea level rise.
it used to be reported that Venice is sinking into the water but now the climate nut jobs have flipped it to it’s actually because it’s rising. I guess it’s all relative
Eh, Venice is also sinking regardless of sea level rise. That’s what happens when you build a city on top of what is practically a swamp. No surprise that big heavy buildings put on top of loose, waterlogged soil are gonna slowly sink into that soil.
I don't know about that. The Iberian peninsula is not historically at much risk for natural disasters, and we now suffer alternating forest fires and floods pretty much every year...
Mostly they seem to have planted a lot more Eucalyptus, which makes the fires worse. The severe floods on the other hand seem to be catching everyone by surprise.
That's not really true. The introduction of so much extra energy into the atmosphere is going to make weather extremes worse all over the world, and harder to predict as historical models become less relevant. Large scale pattern changes like the AMOC shutting down are going to completely change many local weather patterns so that e.g. places that have little history of tornados will start having them, or places that used to be too wet for wildfires will suddenly experience them in extreme drought conditions. Despite scientists' best efforts, we're running a global experiment with no control group and predictions will only become more difficult the harder we push the system into a new state.
> Even pessimistic scenarios don't predict threats to buildings
Floods, storms, droughts, fire? They appear to be getting worse.
More restrictive codes designed for better fireproofing buildings, for instance, can solve a number of problems in California in fire prone areas. Another thing that has a political solution is forest management. Lack of water can be solved by desalination, which becomes an energy problem rather than a water one. Very dry areas can benefit from solar panels because they reduce water loss from evaporation, thus reducing the pressure on water supplies.
London is at much more risk of flooding. Parts of London were built on wetlands not much above sea level, and there’s a big river running right through the middle.
You're refuting a lot of established facts about the risks of climate change, in a way that seems indicative of a certain ideology. Can you explain more what your position is?
My position is that climate change is an existential threat to civilization, but buildings are not at a risk that would make them uninsurable. We build cities both in very wet and very hot and dry climates without much trouble. Those are engineering problems we can solve without much trouble.
It's also a social coordination problem. For example a neighborhood where all the homes have to be fire resistant is going to fare a lot better, and probably be cheaper for the individual home owners to build and insure, than the one fire-resistant home in a neighborhood of tinder boxes. I don't think the prognosis is good for the U.S. in that regard. We have very little social cohesion and a lot of parties interested in making the situation worse for their own benefit.
Does it really matter if my house burns because of pole drift or because of climate change? I don't like it burning either way. So if there is something I can do against my house burning, (and I know there are things I can do against that) I will definitely try that. And I believe we agree that we could do things, right?
Can there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles being fixed points as a matter of definition.
Each ellipsoid is rigidly defined (well, some historic ones are sloppy), so WGS84 won't drift .. (that's a bold statement, is it true down to the micron and if so what are the absolute* datums to reference against?).
That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole".
Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums.
The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc.
We still use many of those old ellipsis and datum’s today. When you’re doing human things, like surveying land, and defining property boundaries. It’s nice to work with a coordinate system which remains fixed relative to the area you’re surveying, and doesn’t drift due to annoying things like tectonic movement, or your entire country slowly tipping into the ocean.
FWiW I'm old enough to have navigated via LORAN and travelled through over two thirds of the 190+ countries on the planet tying in multitudes of old datums to the "new" WGS84 standard as part of a career in geophysical surveying (Gravimetrics, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, EM, etc.)
I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that.
Sure everyone these day maps their local references back to WGS84, but the local references are still tied to local datum.
Plate tectonics can result in some parts of the world moving at up 10cm a year, which over 10s to 100s of years can add up to something pretty significant. Funnily enough an OSM April Fools joke is a good place to learn more[1].
Talking of the UK. Ordinance survey still maintain their own master geodesics, and geographic references, which allows them to tie the OS grid (which what the land registry uses to locate property) back to WGS84, as both WGS84 and the UK slowly drift around due to various reasons (such as improved tech to refine the definition of WGS84, tectonic drift etc). You joke about the ice age and glaciers, but the UK is still “recovering” from all that ice, resulting in vertical movement of about 1m every 100 years. Which given how long property rights can last (Oxford University is almost 1000 years old), can actually turn into a material difference, and real land disputes, over time, if not properly corrected for.
Each of these adjustments may seem insignificant on their own, but they accumulate over time, and it gets complicated when these adjustments are forced to interact with humans, our somewhat fuzzy perception of reality, and general disregard for well defined coordinate systems which don’t align well with our “intuitive” understanding of the world.
None of this is any different to how we deal with issues that are thrown up by our increasing ability to measure time accurately. We track International Atomic Time (IAT), which is time as tracked by a set of atomic clocks, but then we apply various adjustments to get UTC, which is human time. Those adjustments exists purely to keep UTC aligned to what humans expect, because the earths orbit wobbles enough that the absolute time produced by IAT doesn’t match up perfectly with how we’ve historically measured time. All of this seems a little silly, but we now live in a world where everyday systems depend on measures accurate enough that all this minor drift becomes important.
Hurricane Sandy flooded big parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. I have friends who couldn't go back to their apartments or offices for months afterwards.
Torrential rain has nothing to do with sea rising which is the topic discussed at hand. You can have torrential rains anywhere in the world not just on the coastline.
Nope. Last time I checked, they were in the business of spewing hate and misinformation (sorry: Alternative facts), undermining any sensible discussion.
Accusing thousands of people of being incompetent is more telling of you than them.
>Accusing thousands of people of being incompetent is more telling of you than them.
Not me. Facts on the ground do it. Honest question - if I wish upon you every medical professional from now on that treats you and your family to be as competent as the part of the administrative state that is responsible for wild fire management and prevention in LA - will you take that as a blessing or a curse?
I hope you don't get downvoted for stating the obvious. This tendency of equating the US to the world happens so frequently and it is 99% a non-US person pointing it out.
You also have to exclude areas that are now in flood planes (most cities), subject to freezing when the infrastructure can’t handle it (all of Texas), tornado prone (everywhere in the US(?)), and consider that the wildfire risk area for the US has expanded dramatically in the last few years.
For example, there was a red flag warning that ran from Colorado to Texas at the beginning of this month.
Parts of many cities have always been in floodplains, but after just looking it up, it does not seem that "most cities" are meaningfully in floodplains. This also does not automatically make even the parts within a floodplain uninsurable, depending on the circumstances.
Likewise, the level of infrastructure, tornado, and wildfire risk for the vast majority of the country is not sufficient for them to be uninsurable. "Occasionally a tornado comes through and gets 1 out of 10k houses" is not even a huge pressure on insurance prices.
Like we see in California, when the government sets a price ceiling, insurance companies just leave. Same in Florida. If the free market truly was allowed run normally, the insurance rates in Pacific Palisades or on the Florida coast would be so high that no one could afford to live there. Is that a bad thing? If someone was living in a house near where they tested missiles, we'd call them crazy. At what point can we say the same about people building and rebuilding over and over in these disaster areas.
I've been trying to talk to people locally, a place with lots of homes built in the woodland-urban interface, about the risks of climate change and how insurance will have to change. Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything. When in reality, insurance is one of the rare areas where risks are very well assessed, not just by the initial insurer but also by a second party when reinsurance is purchased. And often those exits from the insurance markers are due to inability to purchase reinsurance.
Of course, explaining anything in detail is likely to make people think you work in the industry (I do not) and get accused of being a shill. All of which proves to me that older generations had a much easier life because nobody so financially ignorant today is in any sort of position to be able to buy a home.
All that said, I don't think it's actually a price ceiling. It's a limitation of what factors can be taken into account to set rates, and constitutional amendment from Prop 108 prevents the legislature from changing it.
> Unfortunately these discussions almost never go well, because it seems that most people have at best a surface level understanding of what insurance is and how it works, and everyone is convinced that it's a full scam and insurance companies are fabricating everything
I have the exact same experience when discussing anything insurance related: People have wild assumptions about how much profit insurance companies are making.
When I ask people how much cheaper they think their insurance (health, home, etc) would be if we forced insurance company profits to zero they usually have some extreme guess like 50%. When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it. The discourse is so cooked that everyone who just assumes insurers are making unbelievable profits without ever checking.
Like you said, when I try to bring numbers into the discussion I get accused of being a shill (or a “bootlicker” if the other person is young).
The environment this creates has opened the door for some really bad politics to intervene in ways that aren’t helpful. I wouldn’t be surprised if the eventual outcome in a lot of these places is that politicians pass legislation putting the local government on the hook for insurance after they squeeze regular insurers so hard they have to back out to avoid losing money in those markets. The consequences won’t manifest for several years, potentially after the politicians have left office, but could be financially burdensome. Similar to how many local governments were very generous with pension plans because politicians knew the consequences would only be felt by their successors.
Health insurance's issue is probably how it induces pure waste everywhere as everyone has to play this dance of ever escalating paperwork which consumes a lot of labor. It's not profit, it's waste. Same with the ever increasing amount of admin. Why is that admin increasing? I estimate insurance or requirements created by insurance is part of the cause.
There is also a lot of other smells of a lack of a competitive market. Very opaque pricing, limits to how many hospitals can be opened in a region, needing paperwork to push against that limit, limits in residency slots, the entire hazing ritual of residency in the first place, limits in opening medical schools, ever escalating requirements to become a doctor, restrictions against doctor owned hospitals or clinics, the fact something like an epipen is still not out of patent and not having many clones by now, large barriers to make medical devices and medications, while simultaneously having great issues with generic drug quality, a horrible food system compared to Europe, while simultaneously having a much harder regulatory state medically compared to europe, etc.
This is spot on. It’s not that I think health insurance companies are making insane profit margins. It’s that their very existence in the system is a pure negative and in fact a moral blight. Inflicting profit into a system that is entirely dedicated to human health is by definition a conflict of interest for basically everyone involved, even if it operated at a hypothetical 100% efficiency.
Lots of things necessary for life are run by for-profit businesses — for example, food production. Do farmers have a “conflict of interest”? What about healthcare in particular makes profit immoral?
If the grocery store decides to remove the prices from everything, and require its shoppers to first call its billing department only open until 5pm to receive a set of numbers, then call their third party subscription service only open until 6pm to receive a non-binding estimate, for every item in their grocery list, then wait weeks or months for the grocery store to have its cashiers take time away from checking customers out to petition the third-party subscription service to allow its customers to buy any item deemed to require prior authorization…
You can typically endure hunger for 15 minutes for the time it takes to go to another food store.
On the other hand, if you are bleeding out in the ER, no such luxury exists.
Insurance executives have a fiduciary duty to maximize the profit of the company.
If the company makes a profit off of treating patients, then it has a financial incentive to not approve treatments that would make patients better.
If the company loses money treating patients, then it has a financial incentive to deny treatment as much as possible.
Unless a legal structure is found which scales profit with quality of care, ethical choices will be at odds with the fiduciary duty of the company officers. Having an AI say “no” and putting someone on hold is a lot less expensive than paying out for a cure that cost billions to develop.
In the case of government-run healthcare, the government at least sees the consequence of poor health outcomes in decreased productivity, competitiveness, gdp, and/or tax revenue, as well as increased use of social services.
In other words, if the insurance company refuses to treat you, it costs the government money to pay for welfare indefinitely, not the insurance company.
There are lots of perverse incentives at work, and vanishingly few people even try to understand them, I think because most people simply don’t believe it could possibly be as bad as it is. And by the time they learn otherwise, they care more about getting healthy again than overextending themselves trying to solve a massively complex problem.
> Insurance executives have a fiduciary duty to maximize the profit of the company.
Probably not. Many insurance companies are not "for profit" companies(not a 501c3, something else). Certainly some are, but most of the giant ones, State Farm, etc are not. Most are Mutual Insurance companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance which handily includes a list of them.
I.e. they are operated more like Vanguard, the investment firm than they are Fidelity(a private for profit company) or Schwab a public for-profit company.
Also, this fiduciary duty thing is not really true, but people think it's true. They do have a duty to work in their shareholders best interests. Lately that's been taken to mean profit above all else, but that's a recent(last few decades) interpretation.
> If the company makes a profit off of treating patients, then it has a financial incentive to not approve treatments that would make patients better.
It depends on if they share the cost(s) of keeping patients healthy or not. Incentives matter. If they are incentivized to keep people healthy, instead of just treating X disease today, it would be a different conversation.
> In other words, if the insurance company refuses to treat you, it costs the government money to pay for welfare indefinitely, not the insurance company.
> There are lots of perverse incentives at work
Agreed. But mostly it's just excess waste as far as I know. I'm not an expert in healthcare, so I'm at best a armchair quarterback here.
>If the grocery store decides to remove the prices from everything, and require its shoppers to first call its billing department only open until 5pm to receive a set of numbers, then call their third party subscription service only open until 6pm to receive a non-binding estimate, for every item in their grocery list,
Good point (buying food would be a nightmare if it worked like American health care!) but that's a different argument from the one made above in the thread, that a profit motive in a vital good inherently creates perverse effects.
Oh yes, these things are exactly equivalent. Problem is, nothing about the health system's incentives aligns with consumer benefit. The most profitable outcome for an insurer is that everyone pays premiums and never uses any services. The most profitable outcome for hospitals is that they charge maximum prices for every service and yet don't really fix underlying problems or prevent future problems. Hospitals profit the most off patients that need a ton of care and have deep pockets. They lose money on giving care to people who cannot afford it and won't pay. They lose money in the long run when preventive care prevents later catastrophic (and expensive) conditions later. Pretty much all of the profit-maximizing forces in the for-profit system are deeply unethical.
If you're going to tell us that because health care providers and health insurance companies are some kind of magic counterbalance against each other that benefit consumers, uh, nope.
>Pretty much all of the profit-maximizing forces in the for-profit system are deeply unethical.
Are you talking about healthcare specifically or businesses in general? AMD wants to make the best CPUs for the most amount of money. Is that "unethical"?
Yes, it is deeply unethical that someone can be bankrupted and become homeless because of a treatable condition because the "market" has decided a price for the service that is astronomical without insurance, while at the same time tying insurance to employment, dividing up insurance markets, and making coverage subject to inscrutable, unappealable decisions made by people sitting behind desks in a completely different part of the country, while the leadership of said organizations and investors make higher profits than ever. It is deeply unethical that a CEO can make tens of millions of dollars--which for most regular people is several lifetimes worth of earnings--in a single year, while dealing in a market that regularly denies coverage to people who then suffer, are financially ruined, and die.
It's not the same as making a better CPU for more money. Not. At. All.
You can also become homeless because the market has decided that rent should cost more than you can afford (in a given area). This involves real estate, equity investing, home insurance, zoning, housing regulation, and banking. Is this equally immoral? How many types of business are similarly immoral?
the question sets up a false dichotomy, unless that was your intent?
For profit fire, military, or police departments result in some very obvious issues, and they would simply be causing maximum distress.
For profit / Not for profit, are all serving the same goal - human well being. We choose for profit models where they would result in surplus, and non profit where its more applicable.
at least thats the theory. Reality is more messed up.
I don’t think health insurance is actually insurance, but I have seen little evidence that it has “insane profit margins”. From what I’ve read, ‘health insurance’ has middling profit margins relative to other insurance specialties; where are you getting that view/data?
Honestly, health insurance has a lot wrong. Things like the 80/20 rule can create some weird incentives. Normally an insururer would want to minimize the costs of what they insure, but if non-claim overheads plus profit has reached 20%, then they can't negotiate lower costs without losing profit, and are actually incentivized to either get more claims or negotiate worse prices.
This is besides all the inefficiencies, and nonsense. For example even if a patent hypothetically knew exactly how long a procedure would go, exactly what personnel would be involed and how, exactly how much anesthesia/sutures/other billable supplies were used, and that there were no complications, and even if they know that no denial of coverage would happen, it is not structurally possible for them to know the out of pocket costs, except for the handful of surgeries that get treated as package deals. It would literally take dozens of hours of phone-calls to the hospital's and each provider's billing department to get the exact codes and amounts they would submit, and then trying to get insurance to price the hypothetical bill, or provide you with sufficient information to price it yourself. And obviously a bunch of the information we are assuming the patient has are unknowable until after the fact.
Part of the problem is insurance has a huge rule engine for deciding which line items are covered by not-allowable (meaning they get written off), plus insurance contract rates are only public for hospitals (so no info for providers that bill separate), and even then the data files don't always contain sufficient data to determine which of the multiple allowable rates for this procedure with this insurance at this facility, with these caveats actually applies).
There is a lot of stuff where this is not the case and pricing is still opaque or takes way too much effort. Like if I want to get a well defined CT scan or blood test. It's not as simple as going on amazon or many other retailers.
A few examples: I wanted to get a CAC scan that my insurance wouldn't cover. My insurance website said that a CAC scan would cost this much with my insurance, along with a total price that would be charged, covered or not. It was something like $80 total. I then called the place to get a CAC scan, and they said since the insurance didn't cover it, the price was $300, and there was no cash pay direct price where I could get it at the listed $80 price, even though they could hypothetically bill the insurance, and the insurance could just bill me the full price. The same place does not have a price listing; there is no online ordering I can do for the CAC scan, I needed to go through a permission process by talking to another doctor to even get the CAC scan in the first place. The fact I even needed to call people, and there was all this bullshit, to do direct cash pay for a simple scan is emblematic of a very broken system.
Or I want to get a blood draw for a blood test ordered by a doctor at one medical. They do not list the total price, even though that should be automated and very clear since it isn't a procedure that would have any 'complications'.
Even the simple shit is not clear at all and takes way more work than it needs.
> When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
Meanwhile, the health care providers:
> But if you look at the list of companies with the highest [return on equity], you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If you want to know which shareholders are making the real money in the health care industry…well, it’s the shareholders of those providers and suppliers.
Definition of "healthcare provider" really confuses me. Why is my nurse lumped together with people researching drugs? Is the CEO of the hospital a "provider"?
> When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
When you consider that single digit percentages of trillions of dollars is still an obscene amount of money it makes sense. People making tens of billions by applying formulas to spreadsheets and shuffling other people’s money around doesn’t sit right with most people.
I hear the same thing about supermarkets. Their margins are razor thin (1-3%), and yet people look at the overall profits and complain, ignoring the fact that the company had to deploy 50-100 times that capital to make that profit.
An alternative is to split these companies into smaller companies, which will each have much lower profits but also higher costs due to lost efficiencies, but people will not be happy with that either.
The profit margin doesn't include things like CEO salary, correct? I could see a scenario where the issue is still corporate greed just not greed that's measured by profit.
Isn't that a bit misleading? Salaries wouldn't be included, but a lot of compensation at the very high end is based on owning stock, and dividends i assume would be part of that profit margin.
Compensation, even in the form of equity, has an equivalent cash price that is owed at the time it is awarded. The receiver has to pay income tax for this compensation, even if it is not cash, and the business has to record it as an expense.
>and dividends i assume would be part of that profit margin.
Dividends and share buybacks are not expenses. They are not money spent for the purposes of operating the business, they are awards to the shareholders. As such, they are not an expense. Dividends and share buybacks happen with the profit, so they will never be included in expenses used to calculate profit margin.
There are lots of highly qualified people at the SEC and FASB working to ensure some semblance of accountability. There is a reason why people from all over the world want to invest in a developed countries’ public equity markets, and that is a belief that most of the time, the numbers are very close to the truth.
In practice yes, but technically no. If a "non-profit" brings in 100 million dollars, and pays all 100 employees a million dollar salary, then that "non-profit" has made no profit. But when someone hears that a "non-profit" made "100 million" dollars, they think it is some kind of scam or something.
One one hand true, on the other hand running all these huge corporations are not cheap. United has 440 000 employees. And who knows how many subcontractors, and so on.
The end-to-end cost society spends on paperpushing is easily hundreds of billions of dollars per year. (Including time lost while waiting on hold to call them, the actual literal work of dealing with these fucking printouts at each stakeholder, the extra effort placed on the paper industry, the postal service, and so on.)
When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low
single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t
believe it.
Or they see that as a cute bit of misdirection. Profits are capped as a percentage of healthcare costs, sure. Healthcare costs are not capped. Drive up the cost of care, drive up the profits.
You ever think it's curious that for-profit insurance companies pay out 2–3x what Medicare does for the same procedures?
>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs
Do you have any source for this?
I’m assuming (because HN) that you had the USA in mind, and it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me given that US insurance fees are more than single digit percentages higher than other high quality care countries with privatised healthcare systems
Insurance fees are not high because the insurance companies are making huge profits.
They're high because providers are making huge profits.
Now granted, they may ultimately be the same thing, but that's a different discussion [1]
In the context of housing (fires, hurricanes etc) insurance is expensive because housing is expensive to build.
[1] insurance companies have to invest their income somewhere. It makes sense to choose companies will high returns. Which includes some health care providers. Which can basically change whatever they like because of structural reasons that have been well discussed.
> Insurance fees are not high because the insurance companies are making huge profits.
United Healthcare alone made $23,000,000,000 in profit in 2023. Health insurance companies have collectively made $371 billion in profits since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Property & Liability insurance (home, car, etc) have relatively modest profit margins, but health insurance companies absolutely are making huge profits.
No, UnitedHealth Group made $22B in profit in 2023. Only about half of that profit came from the UnitedHealthcare insurance business. The other half came from the Optum side which is a mix of non-insurance stuff. Optum makes huge profits on software: if the software business was spun out it would be one of the top 20 US tech companies.
why is this number considered huge? What measure are you using? These absolute numbers are meaningless, because you have to put it into context. That's why profit margin is what analysts use, not the absolute number.
If i changed those figures to: they made $77 per person, per year in the USA for providing healthcare services, does that still seem as big? Or is it now reasonable?
Right, but why use Apple ($800 phone every 2-4 years) compared to say, an automaker ($40k in depreciation over 10 years) or a REIT ($2000 in rent every month)? Moreover, why focus on absolute profits? If the healthcare industry split into 3 (eg. doctors, dental, drugs) but with the same margins, does that mean they're suddenly not "too profitable"?
The issue in the US is that there is no price regulation for different procedures (other than Medicare), plus the providers (hospital chains) are intertwined* with insurance. The end result is everyone charges as much as they can and the premiums need to be high, even if insurance technically negotiates the rates down from the “sticker” price. Insurance companies are willing to take a small percent of profit because there is so much money being taken from customers.
Right, low profit margins are not a valid argument for why it’s invalid for consumers to suspect there is some inefficiency compared to other markets. Saying the system must be efficient because profits are low is like saying boiling water should be as cheap as 98->99 degrees C because it’s just +1 C - profit margins aren’t as good an indicator of whether there is an unusual amount of disorder in the system, compared to extremely context-sensitive resource costs for hypothetically identical systems.
I think the point is more that the insurers are not the real target for your wrath. You should not motivate your congress person to do something about the insurance necessarily. It's probably better to look at a level further up the chain for example.
Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries, their executives, doctor's office billing coding, advertising, etc.
The shareholders take home only a fraction. But a lot of money gets spent that simply doesn't need to be. Other countries avoid the deadweight loss of the middle man.
>Part of the problem is that the existence of the middle man adds a lot of costs: insurance company salaries, their executives, doctor's office billing coding, advertising, etc.
that's not a sophisticated analysis. it would be like saying mcdonalds is unecessarily expensive because executive pay, and cars, and dry cleaning, etc. etc. yet, if you tried to found a competitor, you'd have all those same expenses. even charities have to pay management.
insurance companies make money because their aggregate risk is less than your individual risk, and you really don't want your individual risk so you are willing to pay them extra, a premium, to get them to shore up your downside. After that it's like any other company selling any other thing.
The genius of the US way is that the politicians avoid the heat when healthcare coverage is denied. Whereas UK and Canadian politicians have to answer to their constituents.
Of course, now that getting murdered is on the table, the US health insurance executives might want to up their compensation.
> Whereas UK and Canadian politicians have to answer to their constituents.
Yeah, and "politicians have to answer to their constituents" is how we got the failed insurance markets in California and Florida. This thread has now gone full circle.
That is the problem with conflating insurance and subsidy.
To buy votes, politicians sell “insurance”, but in reality it is a subsidy to a specific group of taxpayers.
When a government directly pays for healthcare, it can’t be called insurance, and so limits to the subsidy are easily attributed to the government leaders.
Whereas, if a government has the population buy “insurance” from non governmental entities, then it can pretend (for the layperson) that it isn’t a government subsidy and so the laypeople can blame limits of the subsidy on someone else.
Obviously, health insurance in the US is far from health insurance and premiums are closer to taxes being paid rather than premiums for one’s own health risks.
That isn’t so true in property and casualty insurance, at least not until governments like California step in.
no offence but that murder had nothing to do with what is right or caring for the people just a game same reason trains got graffiti on them. At most a beautiful lesson in the power that comes with controlling the narrative
These are all the publicly listed health insurers in the US, with public financials, so the numbers come from the 10-Q and 10-K reports filed with the SEC.
Note that the first one, United Health, has slightly higher profit margins than the rest because UNH has an enormous business selling healthcare itself, not just insurance (they own a lot of doctor groups and outpatient clinics and employ a lot of doctors and nurses).
Some Blue Cross Blue Shield Association members are for-profit corporations now.
As for UnitedHealth Group, much of their profit comes from a large software business which is separate from their insurance, care delivery, and PBM businesses. If that software business was spun out it would be one of the 20 largest US tech companies.
> As for UnitedHealth Group, much of their profit comes from a large software business which is separate from their insurance, care delivery, and PBM businesses. If that software business was spun out it would be one of the 20 largest US tech companies.
In this list, I couldn’t find a single for profit BCBS licensee
other than Elevance.
Keep in mind Anthem/Elevance absorbed a bunch of licensees. So, for instance, Empire BCBS was for-profit but as of 2024 is part of Elevance.
At a quick glance Highmark and Wellmark are for-profit. And I believe the South Carolina licensee is as well. Mind you a few of the "non-profit" BCBS licensees have been sued over claims that they ought not be considered not-for-profit.
Wellmark is a mutual insurance company (profits go back to policyholders, seems not comparable to a for profit insurance business, and for this discussion, is not going to have a profit margin that results in higher costs to policyholders):
>Mind you a few of the "non-profit" BCBS licensees have been sued over claims that they ought not be considered not-for-profit.
I see no successful lawsuits, though. Still seems like Elevance is the only for profit BCBS licensee.
>In 2014, BC/BS of Illinois (Health Care Service Corporation) was sued over its nonprofit status. The lawsuit was dismissed, with prejudice, and the dismissal ruling was upheld on appeal.[62] Similar suits occurred with similar results in other states such as Oregon.[63]
To be clear if Elevance is the only remaining for-profit BCBS licensee it's because they bought the others.
Highmark got labeled as for-profit on its Wikipedia entry likely because they own a variety of for-profit companies including e.g. Highmark BCBSD Inc. and Celtic Hospice LLC.
But Highmark, the parent organization, is still a non profit. Based on their revenue and expenses on their 990 going back a decade, the entire organization is not delivering profit to any owners, it’s just spending money earned in its for profit subsidiaries elsewhere in its org.
Specifics aside, I think it is conclusively shown that no health insurance / managed care organization earns a ton of profit margin. No one is going to become billionaire rich by starting up a managed care organization, because they will spend almost all they earn.
It’s such a low profit margin business, that Buffett, Dimon, and Bezos abandoned it:
But Highmark, the parent organization, is still a non profit.
So? The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit but Mozilla Corporation is for profit. They're delivering profit, just with an added layer of indirection. In this case the Highmark parent is technically a non-profit but e.g. Highmark BCBSD, the Delaware arm, is a for profit BCBS licensee.
To who? Are there shareholders profiting? Employees on the take?
> Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects.
You can literally read the 10-K statement from any of several publicly traded medical insurance companies. Average industry profit margin is about 3%. There are also some non-profit insurers but their fees generally aren't any lower.
You do realize health insurers have federally mandated caps on their profits, which simply incentivizes creative accounting to make money in more oblique ways, right?
>When you point out that, for example, health insurance profits are low single digit percentage of overall healthcare costs they just don’t believe it.
It's not that I don't believe it, it's that this figure is completely unrelated to the damage and waste caused by the system of healthcare and health insurance we have in the US.
I mean, in a system of chattel slavery, you see above-normal profits competed away, but that in no way means the system isn't exploiting anyone, because that's not how the harm shows up! And yet still we'd see that argument get batted around in comments like yours:
"No, your owner can't possibly be exploiting you because, when you consider your purchase cost, he doesn't actually make much profit!"
Health Insurance IS a huge racket. Insurance profits are only a small slice. Executive compensation isn't part of profits. The profits of the required sole source medical supplies company isn't part of insurance profits. The contracts, salaries, benefit packages, overpayments, and waste of healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies aren't reflected in insurance profits. Just looking at the raw profit percentages returned to shareholders is absolutely meaningless.
You have to look at the entire healthcare picture and realize that insurance is the system driving the exorbitant costs. There is no legitimate reason for healthcare prices to be so insane.
> I've been trying to talk to people locally, a place with lots of homes built in the woodland-urban interface, about the risks
Its not just the insurance costs either. My neighbor is an architect who now does planning/consultation with the RFS (rural fire service, australia). Its basically de rigueur for people to try and avoid or evade fire sensitive planning controls. Just the most basic concepts like defensible space, eve guards, or nonflammable finishes, let alone adequate on site water storage or site access. People are intentionally building in bushland because they want to be “in trees”, unless they block the view of course.
Even if they understand the concepts and remember black saturday, or a few years back!, it doesnt apply to them. Theres no concept of personal risk & consequences, and theyre right. They will probably get bailed out by volunteers and socialized losses. Just like new developments along riverine flood ways.
At some level, insurance is about spreading out financial risk. Insurance companies would love for every policy to be profitable, but if we let it go that far, it's merely a savings account with negative interest rates. At another level, insurance is about analyzing risk and making it more expensive to take bigger risks. Where do we want the tradeoff between these things? Whatever we choose, we have to have some ability to predict / evaluate risk.
In the face of climate change, places that have been safe for a very long time are becoming unsafe. But I don't see a reason these shifts won't happen over and over as climate change unfolds. It might be worse than mass migrations... migrations to locations which later become dangerous, turning into recurring mass migrations.
How well can we predict where it will be safe in the coming decades and where it won't. Coastal land at or below current sea level (plus storm surge) is fairly predictable, especially where there isn't the population density (and money) to support building sea walls. But with things like rivers changing course (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsek_River), it might become very difficult to predict what's going to be safe down the road. Today we talk about things like 100-year flood plains, but how will we establish flood probabilities when the river that might flood in 10 or 20 years doesn't even exist today?
Are the people who get unlucky with predictions just screwed because their home equity is gone? Or are we going to decide to shoulder the burden together? We're going to find out a lot about humanity, the role of government, etc. as we go through all of this.
Soon, people will realize that the entire economic system that caused climate change in the first place will not save us. Once we stop sacrificing our lives in the name of Almighty Profit, then maybe we can move forward and come up with solutions that aren't just "lol stop living in LA".
>Soon, people will realize that the entire economic system that caused climate change in the first place will not save us.
Disagree. "the entire economic system that caused climate change in the first place" is also responsible for the green transition, including cheap electric cars and renewable energy.
>Once we stop sacrificing our lives in the name of Almighty Profit, then maybe we can move forward and come up with solutions that aren't just "lol stop living in LA".
Alright, what's your solution to "the entire economic system that caused climate change in the first place" that aren't just "lol just stop capitalism"?
The issue is not that people believe that insurance companies are not pricing risk correctly. It's that because there is so little competition in the market, people are aware that insurance companies can charge higher premiums because they operate as an oligopoly.
Your statements contradict each other, don't they?
In the many many complaints I have heard about the insurance industry, nobody has complained about them acting as an oligopoly or about a lack of competition.
Further, pricing is extremely regulated in terms of what can be factored in, so being an oligopoly doesn't have much impact on that.
Insurance should not be for profit, and things like e.g. State Farm suddenly cancelling people's renters/fire insurance just two weeks before the fires (I am one of those people) are what people hate about insurance. No one is arguing that insurance is bad at risk assessment, but rather how they wield their proficiency with it.
Why does State Farm in particular have a moral obligation to insure you against fire if it’s not profitable for them to do so?
To pick random examples of unrelated companies, McDonalds or SpaceX would also refuse to insure you against fire. Why should people hate State Farm for this reason, but not McDonalds or SpaceX?
If State Farm didn’t exist and the state ran insurance instead, and were willing to insure all comers, they’d be subsidizing people who can’t be insured profitably. That’s not crazy on its face (the state subsidizes lots of different things), but it’s at least worth asking why we should be paying for people to live in high-fire-risk areas rather than any number of other things the state could be spending those resources on.
> Why does State Farm in particular have a moral obligation to insure you against fire if it’s not profitable for them to do so?
They don't, but they have the courtesy of giving myself and thousands of others a proper heads up. Perhaps any heads up? They quite literally just dropped me, no email, no letter, no nothing. This type of thing should be given 3 months minimum.
> To pick random examples of unrelated companies, McDonalds or SpaceX would also refuse to insure you against fire. Why should people hate State Farm for this reason, but not McDonalds or SpaceX?
Alright, you just lost me, not even bothering to read the rest of your post. To answer your utterly moronic question: because they aren't in the business of insurance. I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
>They don't, but they have the courtesy of giving myself and thousands of others a proper heads up. Perhaps any heads up? They quite literally just dropped me, no email, no letter, no nothing. This type of thing should be given 3 months minimum.
No way that happened, the state would not allow it.
>It’s important to note that nonrenewal is not canceling. Customers affected by the decision will retain coverage until their current contract is up. The company said those impacted will be notified between July 3 and Aug. 20.
I can assure you that I received nothing of the sort. In fact, I only found out because I called about transferring my policy to a new house. And yes, I read all email/snail mail sent by them. I was given zero heads up.
I don’t think it was moronic at all; the point is to get to the bottom of what assumptions and axioms you’re using. What is the moral framework according to which you claim State Farm has wronged you. Only then can we judge whether your claim is in fact correct.
> because they aren't in the business of insurance
So, if I understand your implicit argument correctly, it seems to be that anyone who sells a product be forced to sell it to anyone, no matter how costly it is to them.
There’s no McDonalds in Barrow, Alaska, presumably because running a McDonalds there would be prohibitively expensive. Is that immoral? Should they have an obligation to open a store there?
> So, if I understand your implicit argument correctly, it seems to be that anyone who sells a product be forced to sell it to anyone, no matter how costly it is to them.
That is clearly, clearly not my argument, but I have a feeling that you're one of those bad faith "and yet you participate in society, curious!" guys, so I'm done here.
State Farm is a mutual insurance company, so it's owned by its policy holders. It's not quite non-profit, but it's in the same ballpark. I've gotten money back from State Farm one year when they (we, I guess) made too much money.
State Farm notified its customers in August of its non-renewal (not cancelling) of policies, plenty of time for homeowners to get new policies or fall back to the state fund.
And what is fire insurance? Is that something unique to CA?
Or some forms of housing in high-risk areas, like sprawling single-family houses, might get too expensive, and the only way for people to live in those places would be a smaller number of denser, more easily defended structures. Also a good thing.
Don't worry, the California government is responding to that by making it illegal to stop offering insurance in the state. That will definitely fix the problem.
Source? Many companies seem to be stopping offering insurance in the state just fine!
The most recent moves seem to be relaxing the pricing rules to allow major disaster pricing and recharging reinsurance rates in exchange for insurers offering more policies in high risk areas.
> The Bulletin was issued pursuant to California Insurance Code section 675.1(b)(1), which states that an insurer “shall not cancel or refuse to renew a policy of residential property insurance for a property located in any zip code within or adjacent to the fire perimeter, for one year after the declaration of a state of emergency . . . based solely on the fact that the insured structure is located in an area in which a wildfire has occurred.”
Which effectively means that anybody in a less risky area of California is just subsidizing those who live in the risky areas. Premia across the board will increase as a result.
Typical California redistribution...but this is from the bottom to the top.
Change the euphemism from government to private insurance to satisfy capitalism gods and keep their giant foot from squishing us… still “on the books” as a co-mingled pool of funds to shift around to solve problems.
Aw …sad… other people exist and need resources too. Not just about your first world skin suit playing temp host to a run of the mill electromagnetic field effect.
People choose where they live, and should bear the cost relative to the amount of risk they chose to take.
Government funding is not a magical blanket that somehow makes it moral to take from someone who made good decisions and give to another who made poor ones.
I get that we're on a tech forum but the vast, vast majority of people in this country don't have the financial ability to just move wherever they want. I'm not saying that means that Floridians shouldn't worry about this, but this bootstraps narrative is ridiculous. Everyone here makes substantially more money than the average Joe.
Agreed in general, but is it reasonable to say to people living in multi-million dollar houses on some of the world's most coveted real estate that they are should assume the risks of it? Or move?
The dutch aren't insured against a dike breaking (Which has its own history).
But the dikes have been collectively maintained through laws and regulation from a local semi-democratic system for 800 years (separate from government). It was a necessity as 1 delinquent could screw up everything.
The point is that the costs (to build the dikes) are fully internalized by the people who live there, rather than being cross-subsidized by people far away.
For new buyers, yes, but there's plenty of people who already have a house but now they have no insurance for it. And sure, the terms of their mortgage say that they have to have it, but what can the lender do if nobody will insure that particular property no matter who the current owner is?
There should be a way to build fire resistant buildings to reduce the cost of insuring them, likely this would be the solution in California without price caps.
You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof. These buildings would be realistically insurable in both California or Florida. They would cost more to build, not THAT much more though especially if land costs many millions, an extra 50k - 100k to build out of concrete is a very reasonable expense.
IARC No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as probable, possible or confirmed human carcinogen by IARC.
ACGIH No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a carcinogen or potential carcinogen by ACGIH.
OSHA No component of this product present at levels greater than or equal to 0.1% is identified as a carcinogen or potential carcinogen by OSHA
> warning for formaldehyde.
Trace amounts can possibly sweat out in specific conditions .. which is why you might choose to install with a vapor barrier.
Trace amounts can possibly sweat out in specific conditions
Nah, it's pretty well documented heat and humidity will release formaldehyde. In paperwork filed with the EPA arguing against new limits, an insulation manufacturer trade group cited California's (OEHHA) exposure limits on formaldehyde as reasonable.
Those limits are:
recently manufactured products contribute no more than 9 µg/m3 of
formaldehyde into the indoor air
So the Prop 65 warning certainly seems reasonable from here.
Yes absolutely, and as another poster pointed out, earthquake codes exist. Metal framing is probably a bit easier to adapt to the same earthquake codes that timber framing has.
Since you mentioned FL, we have mostly solved hurricane level wind resistant building codes. Hurricane ties are cheap and they work. Anything built post hurricane Andrew has these. There's also materials like Hardi Plank siding, which does add a bit more cost, but effectively surrounds the house in a thin layer of concrete. Flooding is a mixed bag. My house is built substantially up and off the ground above the '100 year flood line'. Even if a flood didn't enter the dwelling proper, it would still be devastating.
The problem is storms are getting bigger and more frequent from climate change and hitting areas they normally don't.
Great article, scientifically written. I wish it was as confident as you are in your conclusion.
> No, we cannot confidently detect a trend today in observed Atlantic hurricane activity due to man-made (greenhouse gas-driven) climate change. Some human influence may be present
> The importance of this distinction between potential causes of AMV for future hurricane projections is clear: if strong man-made aerosol forcing and volcanic forcing were responsible for most of the “quiet period” of Atlantic major hurricane activity from the 1970s through the early 1990s, then a return to this more “quiet” regime in the coming decades may not occur. But if the “quiet period” of the 1970s through early 1990s (as well as the earlier quiet period of the early 20th Century) was caused mainly by internal climate variability, one would expect to return to relatively “quiet” conditions in the coming decades as the climate swings back and forth between more active and inactive Atlantic hurricane periods. This is an important research question that does not yet have a clear answer.
Meanwhile we continue to see stronger storms.
> Another hurricane metric, the fraction of rapidly intensifying Atlantic hurricanes, was reported to have increased since around 1980 (Bhatia et al. 2019), and they found that this change was highly unusual compared with simulated natural variability from a climate model, while being consistent in sign with the expected change from human-caused forcing. Even so, however, their confidence was limited by uncertainty in how well the single climate model used was representing real-world natural variability in the Atlantic region.
We do know for a fact that the ocean temperatures are rising. Also from your article,
> Global surface temperatures and tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures have increased since 1900 (by around +1.3 ˚C [+2.3 ˚F] and +1.0 ˚C [+1.8 ˚F], respectively), unlike the reconstructed hurricane counts or U.S. landfalling hurricanes. Finally, a number of studies have found that several Atlantic hurricane metrics, including hurricane maximum intensities, hurricane numbers, major hurricane numbers, and Accumulated Cyclone Energy have all increased since around 1980.
But climate science is about studying a complex system, and finding direct causations is hard.
> However, in a 2019 tropical cyclone-climate change assessment, the majority of authors concluded that the recent hurricane activity increases mentioned above did not qualify as a detectable man-made influences (meaning clearly distinguishable from natural variability).
>[R]ecent studies in attribution science show that climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and/or severity of tropical storms, heavy rainfall, and extreme temperatures.
So at the end of the day, it's fine to say there is no smoking gun, but it is absolutely not 'obviously false'. I think your biases are showing.
I've been collecting a bunch of links on what things a homeowner can do. Probably the simplest thing is the clear a 5 foot ember resistant zone around the home. So remove greenery and replace wood chips with stone for example. Use fire resistant vents so ember does enter attic or crawlspace. Use Class A fire rated roof (which you can also get for asphalt shingles). If you have wood siding, replace with fiber cement siding...
> You can build out of concrete and use fire resistant materials like metal or tile for the roof and your house is nearly fireproof
Just like exactly the rest of the world? We, the non-USA folks, are looking yearly at either fires or hurricanes destroying these wooden houses there and people keep rebuilding them. Insanity.
The US has a practically limitless amount of wood. Europe doesn’t. Wood also holds up well to earthquakes and can be treated to hold up to fire. And if there’s a catastrophic failure, it hurts a lot less than concrete does when it falls on your head. It’s a great material that the US is right to use.
A stucco, brick, or fibre cement siding, have 2m/6' clear around the base of your house, tempered windows, and either a metal roof or shingles with a Class A fire rating.
Place a piece of wood inside the hot environment of a fire and it will burn down releasing more heat than it absorbs, adding to the fire. It doesn't matter what stuff you add to it.
You can make wood not burn on the kind of environment where it would be the only or main object releasing heat. That is still a completely different category from non-flammable materials.
Earthquakes make this a much more expensive option. To give you some idea, the design seismic acceleration for my house is like 3g. That's more sideways than down. The forces involved are the weight of the structure times this value. Concrete ways a LOT more. It absolutely can be done, but it's not clearly a superior material compared to wood.
The rest of the world has mudslides, floods, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, etc. Or they have no natural disasters, just like so many parts of the US.
How about profit caps? I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders.
To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.
> I feel like government stepping in and being the insurer with a sufficiently large pool of risk to spread around lets them set a fair rate without the need to make a return or answer to shareholders.
Youre about 20-30 years late to the game, but arrive in time to see the conclusion does not match your assumption. See california for fire, florida for fstorm damage, and everywhere in the us for federal flood coverage. It doesnt work. CA FAIR has higher rates to account for increasing the coverage pool, but it doesnt look like premiums will cover the current or future loses. Which is the universal story when your policy attracts all the high risk/payout buyers. And FAIR, roughly, is setup to go recoup losses from all the _other_ insurance providers in the state. Even ones not insuring those policy holders _or that type of insurance_. Its just a layer of indirection to subsidize fire risk against all poly holders.
In all of those examples you have the for profit private insurance leaving the market because it's not profitable enough. When you take away excessive profits and allow the governmental pool to compete with for profit insurance, risk is leveled across the pool and consumers pay less. If the big private insurance companies can't be more efficient or have better risk models than the government, well they should stop trying to sell policies.
The people are risk pay less, all of the other people forced to participate in your general insurance pay more.
If I live in the middle of a city in an apartment block should I pay the same rates to insure against wildfire as someone in the middle of a dry forest? Probably not, but govenrment-mandated insurance programs force me to.
Premiums should be based on risk, not flat. I don't know where you are drawing that line of reasoning from. Just because the government is providing coverage doesn't mean it's all the same rate. Every insurance product has a risk model to set prices. I was just advocating that we have a non profit minded entity with deep pockets do it vs private companies motivated by maximizing profit.
Public benefit corps fit this model as do regulated utilities.
Edit: i think were talking past each other until agreeing that risk/cost/rates are being intentionally suppressed by or on behalf of the public. Kind if like this other housing related mortgage thing Ive heard if that may be mispriced/misstructured in favor of many at the expense of all.
I dont get it. Your argument is that if everything was priced accurately and aggregated "fairly" insurance would work. Ok, totally true statement. Very much the case that's not what is happening now for any of the example markets or gov programs.
You appear to believe "profit" is the problem, which is true in that negative profit is known as "loss" which is what has and will be occurring even with the public "last resort" rates. The private insurers are not withdrawing because their "fantastic" 6-15% margin on disaster insurance isnt enough. Using CA as an example they withdrew because 1) the state required they dont use risk based modeling for individual rates and 2) they dont include reinsurance costs as a rate signal. Shockingly their CA insurance pool turned upside down on costs/losses in a decade or two and they bailed.
FAIR is exactly the sort of or youre talking about; non profit government mandated insurance pool, open to all residents, with proportional policy/loss assignment, rates set based on regulated-interpretation-of-risk-exposure + costs, regulated by the CA Dept of Insurance. And yes, their policies are risk adjusted, but theyre not _accurate_. And yes, insurance should accurate according to risk and (payout) costs but basically none of the public last resort issuers can!
See again florida, national flood, etc. In every case 1) risk & cost modeling (accurate pricing) is suppressed on behalf of the public 2) risk prices/costs soon exceed private risk markets 3) private insurers withdraw 4) public "last resort" insurers emerge 5) risks/costs continue to grow, private insurers withdraw, the "last resort" insurer becomes the risk aggregating insurer 6) last resort insurer shockingly cant meet its commitments 7) public funds and/or backdoor insurance taxes socialize losses due to unprices disk.
> To some extent this has helped with health insurance. Each year I get a check back from my insurer saying they didn't spend enough on my care vs my premiums.
This has baffled me ever since Obamacare was first passed - it seems that each year the insurance companies have an incentive to drive up the cost of healthcare, since that’s how they earn more money in absolute terms. Is it not so?
That is so, to an extent. But it's balanced against employer demands to hold down medical costs because they pay most of the bills. If your HR department can save 5% on employee medical costs by switching from Blue Cross to Cigna next year they'll absolutely do it.
First of all there isn’t one “European model”, every country in Europe has its own system.
To answer the substantive point, it’s extremely difficult to pass substantial laws in the US due to the structure of its political system. The mandatory coalition of the president + 60% of the senate + 50% of the House of Representatives is a much higher bar than any other democracy. So laws aren’t written to be optimal policy, they are written to satisfy this extremely high coalition requirement — Obamacare in particular was very fundamentally weakened from some of the more expansive initial proposals to address the concerns of one or two senators and get them on board.
but people always talk about how insurance is guaranteed in europe something must be working if gunning down a CEO is pro the people wouldn't copying one of the European countries be even more pro the people?
what makes senators hate something that is pro the people? wouldn't that give them better ratings? I come from a dictatorship so sorry if this is a dumb question
There is an unlimited amount of potential financial gain from American politics, both in lobbying and campaign financing. It is also widely true that the candidate with the most money spent in a campaign is heavily favored to win the election, with the exception of the presidency which is more contested. Now consider that in the 2020s the richest people now have more money than God.
The short of it is that you can get anyone you want in office, to do anything you want even if it directly opposes their constituency, as long as you spend enough money on them to get them in office, buy their vote, and keep their PR afloat.
The answer was already given: it was politically infeasible to pass a single payer variant in the US. And it’s not clear it would have been good even if it had been feasible.
Sentiments on Luigi seem to put him on the same level as Rosa Parks or Jesus Christ if not higher both on HN and Reddit but that is ancedotal
Could you say a bit more about the politics? this is very fascinating idk much about insurance or politics
This may be super simplistic but Europe, if you look at it at a high level, is as diverse as US states if not more because a lot of places have multi party systems instead of a two party system with comparable diverse interest groups and comparable GDP etc
What did they figure out to have insurance that the US can't? Or doesn't want to?
> What did they figure out to have insurance that the US can't?
Not sure how I can say it more clearly. Most European countries have a functioning political system where it is easy (or at least possible) to pass necessary laws. The US doesn’t.
Simply put, a lot of people in US are genuinely convinced that European-style universal health insurance means that they'll be worse off than they are today. This myth is maintained by agitprop from right-wing sources that tells them about "death panels" and multi-year waiting queues (while conveniently forgetting to mention that all these things also exist in US, with the only difference that you can avoid it if you have enough money).
I think that's a great metaphor for the situation, when you get a patient running a 105 fever you put them in an ice bath and then consider what underlying problem is ailing them.
You do the first part so they don't die before the long-term treatment kicks in.
Sure. Because the response of a failure in governance is more government? What you are proposing is "unfair". You are essentially suggesting that the rest of the country subsidize a subset who wants to live near high-risk areas. Me too want to live in a dense forest and also have my house by the edge of the river.
You could make the argument for this for healthcare, since no one can choose which illness he is born with. But choosing your housing location is a "choice". And you can/should move somewhere else where it is less risky.
> Because the response of a failure in governance is more government?
Are you this incredulous when the response to a failure in "the market" is more "market" ? Or when companies fail, and the response is "more companies", do you question that in the same way?
I'm not taking a position on the meat of your point, but this particular angle strikes me as very strange.
People choose to smoke, overeat, engage in risky activities that can cause injury near and long term (Rock climbing, riding motorcycles, football, MMA). Why should society pay for these choices?
Because it's the only way to get universal coverage, which if you don't have, means a portion of the population gets really sick, jams the ER, can't afford to pay the resulting bill (maybe declaring bankrupcy), and someone then has to eat/cover the cost. Often by hiking prices for those that do have coverage.
Do a search for "ACA three legged stool":
> It starts by requiring that insurers offer the same plans, at the same prices, to everyone, regardless of medical history. This deals with the problem of pre-existing conditions. On its own, however, this would lead to a “death spiral”: healthy people would wait until they got sick to sign up, so those who did sign up would be relatively unhealthy, driving up premiums, which would in turn drive out more healthy people, and so on.
> So insurance regulation has to be accompanied by the individual mandate, a requirement that people sign up for insurance, even if they’re currently healthy. And the insurance must meet minimum standards: Buying a cheap policy that barely covers anything is functionally the same as not buying insurance at all.
> But what if people can’t afford insurance? The third leg of the stool is subsidies that limit the cost for those with lower incomes. For those with the lowest incomes, the subsidy is 100 percent, and takes the form of an expansion of Medicaid.
> Because it's the only way to get universal coverage, which if you don't have, means a portion of the population gets really sick, jams the ER, can't afford to pay the resulting bill (maybe declaring bankrupcy), and someone then has to eat/cover the cost. Often by hiking prices for those that do have coverage.
The alternative that is always there is to repeal EMTALA.
> It starts by requiring that insurers offer the same plans, at the same prices, to everyone, regardless of medical history. This deals with the problem of pre-existing conditions. On its own, however, this would lead to a “death spiral”: healthy people would wait until they got sick to sign up, so those who did sign up would be relatively unhealthy, driving up premiums, which would in turn drive out more healthy people, and so on.
> The alternative that is always there is to repeal EMTALA.
I suspect you think it's not great having homeless people on the street.
Wait till you see what it looks like when they actually start dying in the street because emergency health care is no longer available to them, nor to many of their housed neighbors, family and friends.
I don't see what EMTALA has to deal with homelessness in this context. It largely comes down to uninsured, even post-ACA. If we can't afford the current system, it's not a matter of if, but when, either hospitals or providers leave medicare. To put it in perspective, the AMA reports (https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/medicare-medica...) that physician medicare compensation has declined 29% since 2001. At a certain point, it will simply be financially unsustainable. Whataboutism to distract from the fact that medicare alone is 3.7% of gdp and is forecast to grow to 5.1% by 2033 (https://www.cato.org/blog/fast-facts-about-medicare-social-s...) doesn't fix anything.
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis puts the 2022 GDP at $25.46 trillion ($25,460 billion). Congress puts 2022 spending on private health insurance at $1,290 billion (5%) and Medicare at $944 billion (3.7% of GDP).
So your argument is that Medicare spending might potentially approach the same proportion of the GDP as a European country that doesn't spend a lot on its healthcare?
Pretty much. And that's just one program that services a small portion of the population. The issue is we can't make this level of spending work, why should we believe spending more money will be successful?
Because from a moral standpoint most people agree that we shouldn't allow people to go without treatment, regardless of their poor choices. From a national standpoint it also doesn't make sense to allow people to become cripples for lack of money, reducing their economic value.
Injuries also hurt, so it's not like people don't have other disincentives to avoid injury aside from the price. This isn't the case in other areas, where it's purely a monetary penalty and thus removing that penalty results in way more of that thing taking place.
After a society brings in universal healthcare coverage, more rules discouraging smoking, overeating, and engaging in risky activities often follow. Which is either a nice way to get the people of the country caring about each other's health, or an awful government overreach depending on your political bent.
Cigarettes can be taxed with proceeds going to care with those with lung cancer. Dangerous activities can have a separate insurance. For a popular sport, it means most people are engaging in this activity. Houses on the top of a mountain are for a very tiny minority (and a very rich one too). They should finance their lifestyles themselves.
I'm not saying everyone pays the same, I'm saying you take away the for excessive profit nature of insurance. If you live in a tinderbox you are going to have more risk and more costs. Yeah somebody has to model the risk and set a price, but I'm saying it shouldn't be someone who has an incentive to make as much profit as possible.
Your seem to be under the misapprehension the problem is insurers charging usurious prices. The reality is Paul in the forest got used to paying whatever 5kpa to insure against a 100 year fire, not 50kpa to insure against a 10 year fire.
It sounds like a lot, but if the risk is actually that high then the prices will be too. Houses aren't cheap. Insurance is a very competitive market, it's easy to comparison shop. The root problem is the high risk, not "unfair" private profit.
Yes, I'm advocating people pay appropriately for risk. The issue is with high risk, insurers pad profits to compensate for excessive risk or leave the market with no option other than some last resort insurers. Having government step in with regulation around profits over time keeps the rates in check. You can have a Lloyd's of London, but they need to have open audited books. Otherwise you can have a not for profit, ie government entity run the book.
Profit caps presumably create perverse consequences. If the profit I'm allowed to make is proportional to X, then I'm incentivized to maximize X. If X is my costs, then... Maybe that's where these unbelievably high line items on medical bills come from.
their september 2024 earnings put them at 6% margin. that’s not very good. for reference apple is 15%, mcdonalds is 32% and costco is about 3%. that being said compared to a competitor, elevance at 2.5%, they’re doing well. a little worse than allstate (car and home insurance), which is about 7%.
To be fair, they play a shell game by steering people towards their subsidiary owned medical providers (avoiding loss ratio limits of 15% to 20% by putting the money into providers, which have no profit cap).[0]
Health insurance does have profit caps, so like the sibling commenter said their margins are small (6%) but also decently under the cap (20%) in the first place.
What period do you put it over for property insurance? Profit caps work for health insurance because claims are typically not correlated. The percentage of your customers with cancer won’t 5x one year and go back to baseline the next. New drugs or treatments (or a drug going off patent) can cause correlated swings, but generally costs to health insurers don’t change a lot year to year.
For property insurance, you need to bring in profits most years to fund the year when there are multiple category V hurricanes or large fires.
The book of business has to be large and the pockets deep. Which describes our current insurance market and the government. The way we handle this now is with reinsurance.
The answer is obviously "no" since there are other parts of the world that don't live on a hurricane highway nor build houses made from firewood in an area prone to wildfires.