In Virginia, they require insurance to a minimum standard. If you don’t get the insurance, you must pay an “uninsured motor vehicle fee”, even though that doesn’t provide insurance. Instead, it puts money into an insurance pool to be used by insurance companies when there is an accident involving an uninsured vehicle.
The justification for government involvement is that government provides the license to drive, and the roads we drive on.
On a practical level, it would be little comfort to be the “responsible” one if you had to pay a lot more for your insurance because your company had to be able to cover you when you are hit by an uninsured vehicle.
Some states have solved this problem by dictating “no-fault” insurance, so that if you buy insurance, you are covered without regard to the other person. But in those states, coverage is more expensive for good drivers, since their ability to not cause accidents is of little value when the insurance company has to cover any accident that happens.
However, I would tend to agree that mandatory car insurance is an unnecessary government intrusion. In some cases, a simply provision of an expedited court proceeding for traffic accident lawsuits would provide a low-cost way for insurance companies to recover damages from an uninsured motorist. And at worst, the cost of uninsured motorists is a manageable sum of money, which can somewhat be avoided by careful defensive driving, and that still can be less costly if you are a good enough driver.
I don’t particularly mind the extra fee for uninsured motorists, in order to help defray the cost, except that it penalizes people who are very good drivers, and own crappy cars that they don’t care about. Such a driver will not CAUSE an accident, and won’t care if his car gets hit, so why should they have to pay money for the privilege of not wasting money.
And in the end, we are just talking about a car. Nobody’s going to run to the government and beg to have car crash losses covered by the state if a person doesn’t have insurance.
Now, let’s compare with medical insurance. The problem is that while a vast majority of the public has no problem with an uninsured motorist losing their car and having to buy some cheap replacement, we don’t feel the same about medical care.
In fact, there is little support for letting people die on the sidewalk in front of a hospital simply because they didn’t buy medical insurance. And in fact, we won’t even let a sick person suffer increased sickness simply because they can’t pay. Even strong conservatives are heard saying “come on now, we know that nobody in America is actually DENIED medical treatment”.
The question is, who pays for this treatment, when the patient cannot pay? If you have insurance, the insurance pays. If you go to a hospital where they treat a lot of people who can’t pay, they will try to pass the cost onto those who have insurance, driving up costs — or else they will go out of business. Unless of course they get tax dollars — which is common.
So in one case, the people who buy insurance essentially buy insurance both for themselves, AND for people who are too cheap to buy their own. In the other case, the costs are paid by all those who pay taxes.
So the next question is, can conservative philosophy provide a solution to the problem of the WRONG people paying for medical treatment, when the most obvious choice of refusing treatment is unviable? Or maybe that’s unfair — can the refusal of treatment be made into a viable alternative?
The problem is that in bad accidents, the damages far excede the assets of your typical uninsured motorist.
And at worst, the cost of uninsured motorists is a manageable sum of money, which can somewhat be avoided by careful defensive driving, and that still can be less costly if you are a good enough driver.
Medical bills and other costs associated with bodily damage from an accident (i.e. physical therapy, lost wages, etc) can be very high and far from manageable.
I don’t particularly mind the extra fee for uninsured motorists, in order to help defray the cost, except that it penalizes people who are very good drivers, and own crappy cars that they don’t care about
No state requires you to buy insurance for damage to your car or body. It's damage to other peoples' cars as well as damage to their person that must be covered, which IMHO is very sound policy.
Furthermore, if insurance companies are allowed to price their policies as they see fit, good drivers will not be penalized. The fact that you're a good driver will keep your premiums low. And like I said, you can always opt out of insurance on your own car.