"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"""
~Murphy's Law
So, I am currently involved in the process of looking to replace my car with a better one. For those of you who know my car, that could actually be accomplished by driving around in Hotwheels car. However, whenever looking at a car to buy, one thing I have no choice but to consider is, "What is it going to cost me for insurance?"
Here's my problem with insurance. IT DOES NOT WORK!!!! For all the thousands of accidents that take place daily, how many hundreds of thousands of drivers make it from point A to point B without so much as cutting off another driver? Yet every single one of them (hopefully*) has insurance on their car. Each and every one of them pays some amount of money per month so that when they wipe out and break someone else's car, or when someone else wipes out and breaks their car, they don't have to pay for all of it. No offense to any and all who have car insurance, but how stupid are you to buy into this system without questioning it?
Allow me to build a situation for you. Alfred pays $200 a month for his car insurance (hopefully he has a relatively nice car). Alfred drives this car for 12 years without ever missing a payment, and never needing anything more than routine maintenance, never hitting someone else or being hit, never even getting hail damage. By this time, Alfred has paid $28,800 into his insurance plan. Next thing you know, some idiot driver slams on the brakes and Alfred rear-ends the guy. When the situation is all worked out, it'll cost $2000 dollars to repair the other dude's car, and about $1000 to fix Alfred's car. Hey, no problem, right? Alfred has faithfully paid his car insurance for the last 12 years, almost 30 G's into the system. They'll cover it all easily, right? Wrong! Alfred's plan has a $3500 deductible. Since he only had to pay $3000, the insurance doesn't kick in at all. Does anyone else see the problem here?
Now, don't get me wrong, insurance can have it's uses. For example, if someone else hits your car, they get to pay for the damage repair instead of you. Or if you completely total the car, the insurance will replace it. But the chances of that are so infinitessimally small it hardly counts. Personally I'm willing to play the odds on this one, and assume that I'm not going to get in any kind of accident. Hell, in 2 years of driving, I've been in a ditch once (no damage to the car) and never once--not once!!--hit another vehicle or been hit (again, for those of you who know my current car, they were all there when I got it). On a day to day basis (despite Texas drivers having on average the common sense of a wheel themselves) I do not fear getting into an accident of any kind. And yet when the time comes and I buy a replacement car, I'll have to insure it because on the whole the American populace wanders around their daily lives individually scared spitless that they'll be the one out of fifteen thousand that gets into a headon collision on the highway.
Hells, going back to Alfred's case, he would have done better to have been putting all the money into a separate savings account, so that not only would it be there for him to use in the event of an accident, but it would gain interest instead of helping to pay for someone else's insurance claim.
Insurance is no less than people paying for protection that they will probably never use, and that might not help them if they need it. What a broken system...
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