Posted on 09/17/2023 3:58:35 AM PDT by fruser1
home owner ins —
2011 I put solar panels on my roof — covered on h/o at that time $1900/yr
2015 total removal and exclusion on these panels, no premium reduction. $2100/yr
2023 premium soars to over $7500 a year.
Because they self-immolate just sitting in your garage?
Holy cow. That’s some scary stuff.
Had a guy step up on our porch the other day trying to sell solar panels...at “no out of pocket costs”. I told him there’s no such thing as free. Because he seemed like a nice guy...I didn’t try to belittle him or his cause...just said “Have a nice day” and closed the door.
I’m sure they add a buck on to our policy. Sure beats a hundred.
I’m sure it’s added into the policy. It’s still a nice feature.
Qwerty - The way you think medical insurance should be handled would be fine were it not for the hypocrisy in how’s it’s implemented.
Penalizing riskier behavior would be ok if it’s proportional to the risk vs actual payouts and you don’t pick and choose which risky behaviors to penalize or not.
E.g., Are people who play contact sports penalized? There is plenty of money spent treating sports injuries and if you happen to be a teenager who’s paralyzed during football that’s quite a lot of expenses to incur over a long lifetime. But such participation is considered “healthy” and may actually get you a credit.
Insurance companies have the data. They can correlate payouts to certain behaviors easy.
There is also the circumstance when risk is replaced by certainty in increased payouts, e.g. being born with type I diabetes - you need insulin et al for life. Should they be charged more? or not because it’s “not their fault”?
So insurance is required to charge more for someone who MAY get sick in the future, but not allowed to charge more for those who ARE sick now because it’s “pre-exisiting”.
Again - hypocrisy. Like the social credit system in China, folks want to use insurance as punishment and only for the risky behaviors they don’t like.
https://fortune.com/2023/02/13/farming-machinery-right-to-repair-broken-tractor-antitrust-ftc/
“On Colorado’s northeastern plains, where the pencil-straight horizon divides golden fields and blue sky, a farmer named Danny Wood scrambles to plant and harvest proso millet, dryland corn and winter wheat in short, seasonal windows. That is until his high-tech Steiger 370 tractor conks out.
The tractor’s manufacturer doesn’t allow Wood to make certain fixes himself, and last spring his fertilizing operations were stalled for three days before the servicer arrived to add a few lines of missing computer code for $950.
“That’s where they have us over the barrel, it’s more like we are renting it than buying it,” said Wood, who spent $300,000 on the used tractor.
Wood’s plight, echoed by farmers across the country, has pushed lawmakers in Colorado and 10 other states to introduce bills that would force manufacturers to provide the tools, software, parts and manuals needed for farmers to do their own repairs — thereby avoiding steep labor costs and delays that imperil profits.
“The manufacturers and the dealers have a monopoly on that repair market because it’s lucrative,” said Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors. “(Farmers) just want to get their machine going again.”
In Colorado, the legislation is largely being pushed by Democrats while their Republican colleagues find themselves stuck in a tough spot: torn between right-leaning farming constituents asking to be able to repair their own machines and the manufacturing businesses that oppose the idea.
The manufacturers argue that changing the current practice with this type of legislation would would force companies to expose trade secrets. They also say it would make it easier for farmers to tinker with the software and illegally crank up the horsepower and bypass the emissions controller — risking operators’ safety and the environment.
Similar arguments around intellectual property have been leveled against the broader campaign called ‘right to repair,’ which has picked up steam across the country — crusading for the right to fix everything from iPhones to hospital ventilators during the pandemic.
In 2011, Congress passed a law ensuring that car owners and independent mechanics — not just authorized dealerships — had access to the necessary tools and information to fix problems.
Ten years later, the Federal Trade Commission pledged to beef up its right to repair enforcement at the direction of President Joe Biden. And just last year, Titone sponsored and passed Colorado’s first right to repair law, empowering people who use wheelchairs with the tools and information to fix them.
For the right to repair farm equipment — from thin tractors used between grape vines to behemoth combines for harvesting grain that can cost over half a million dollars — Colorado is joined by 10 states including Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont.
Many of the bills are finding bipartisan support, said Nathan Proctor, who leads Public Interest Research Group’s national right to repair campaign. But in Colorado’s House committee on agriculture, Democrats pushed the bill forward in a 9-4 vote along party lines, with Republicans in opposition even though the bill’s second sponsor is Republican Rep. Ron Weinberg.
“That’s really surprising, and that upset me,” said the Republican Wood.
Wood’s tractor, which flies an American flag reading “Farmers First,” isn’t his only machine to break down. His grain harvesting combine was dropping into idle, but the servicer took five days to arrive on Wood’s farm — a setback that could mean a hail storm decimates a wheat field or the soil temperature moves beyond the Goldilocks zone for planting.
“Our crop is ready to harvest and we can’t wait five days, but there was nothing else to do,” said Wood. “When it’s broke down you just sit there and wait and that’s not acceptable. You can be losing $85,000 a day.”
Rep. Richard Holtorf, the Republican who represents Wood’s district and is a farmer himself, said he’s being pulled between his constituents and the dealerships in his district covering the largely rural northeast corner of the state. He voted against the measure because he believes it will financially impact local dealerships in rural areas and could jeopardize trade secrets.
“I do sympathize with my farmers,” said Holtorf, but added, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to be forcing the sale of their intellectual property.”
At the packed hearing last week that spilled into a second room in Colorado’s Capitol, the core concerns raised in testimony were farmers illegally slipping around the emissions control and cranking up the horsepower.”
Guess that’s why a lot of us will never have solar panels,EVs, or much of any other high-tech super expensive stuff. Close to where I live is a rather large solar array & we get hail here. The solar is currently pretty well destroyed & for some reason has not been repaired...as yet. Just one of many problems with some of the high-tech stuff. From what I can see, there are volumes of problems with EVs. It looks we have Biden to thank for much of this “progress”. I live in a plain home, drive an 18 yr. old car that does most everything well & is reasonably durable & easy on gas. Has good performance & will drive comfortably at 80 mph speed limits. Of course, I will lose some gas mileage at those speeds.
This is also a valid point.
Human Favoritism, Prejudice and Emotion all change the way Numerical Statistics and Mathematics are used to determine Insurance Rates for Risk of Loss.
It's not the insurance system that has a problem, it's the Humans that try to control it to Enforce THEIR policy.
The word FORCE is in that word enforce, thus the difficulty with "insurance".
“They are holding off until the transition is close to 50%.”
Unlikely. The word has gotten out about EVs being white elephants. The car dealers lots are full and they are not moving. The next stage is markdowns or worse. Manufacturers will probably refuse returns.
So, governments will have to come up with new schemes and scams to raise taxes.
Susceptibility to catching fire and taking all nearby objects (like the garage) with it, while the fire department stands by to protect nearby structures, unable to put the fire out.
That’s why insurance is higher on them. Risk assessment dictates rates.
I will not respond well when I find one day that the rates for my ICE vehicle skyrocket as the insurance companies spread the risk among all of their insureds.
It’s coming.
Then it becomes a matter of cost vs. benefits, which is related to the % of each. Seeing as unintentional accidents are by far the leading cause of death then there is no end to what can be outlawed or penalized under the premise of saving lives, but what kind of lives would result for all?
Insurance companies have the data. They can correlate payouts to certain behaviors easy.
But as shown in my post, when a non-essential practice by about 4% of the adult population is responsible for approx. 80% of new HIV cases and primarily responsible for over 740,000 American deaths includes a greatly increased incidence of other infectious diseases, then insurance is forbidden to penalize such, but to enable it (though on one hand it decreases deaths which insurance pays for). However, even apart from such, the practice is immoral, and deleterious to lives and souls.
Hydrocarbon vehicles. One is gasoline-fueled, and the other is diesel-fueled. Hyrdocarbons. HV.
They aren’t “penalized”. The cost of repair is just more on your Tesla so you will pay higher rates.
Math is math folks… you made a decision to purchase a car that is more expensive to repair… that equates to higher premiums.
It is added into everyone’s policy whether they use it or not. The more people that use it, the more costs that get shared across the pool of customers, then the greater the increase in insurance costs over time. Thus higher insurance premiums for everyone in the pool.
Stupid should hurt.
Regular cars also get “Totaled” by insurance when the air bags deploy.
TOO expensive to replace.
Ford has laid off 600
GM has laid off 2,000
I do NOT know IF they can collect UNEMPLOYMENT
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