"Ain’t no snitches riding with us
Ol mo the mouth n***as could holler the front" - Lil’ Wayne
How does it work elsewhere? We require doctors get malpractice insurance, and there’s growing support for making the police get liability insurance too.
I live in Estonia.
For one, car insurance depends on your basic demographics (car registration location, owner’s years of driving/insuring experience), the car’s power rating and make/model - and finally, accident history. For any type of insurance that covers your own vehicle as well, it also takes into account the age and value of the vehicle (for the mandatory liability insurance, that’s irrelevant).
For medical insurance, your prior medical history doesn’t matter, there are no premiums. Your options are (simplified, there are some others too):
-
Work and have social tax paid for you by the employer (they don’t get to weasel out of this with a regular work contract)
-
Be an entrepreneur and pay yourself at least the minimum monthly salary with social tax, the rest you can take out as dividends or invest into growing the company
-
Be a student, including university
-
Be underage (this also gives you dental! I do wish everyone got dental)
-
Be registered as unemployed and at least act like you’re trying to find a job
-
Have some sort of permanent disability that’s severely impacting your ability to work
-
Have a child under 3 years old
-
If nothing else applies to you, you can pay a certain sum which was either monthly or quarterly, to have the same health insurance (this is mostly for those entrepreneurs who don’t want to pay themselves even a minimum salary because they’re already loaded and would rather avoid paying payroll taxes on themselves and only pay income tax if/when taking out dividends). I suppose you could also do it if your income is entirely illegal and therefore untaxed.
If you hit any of these, you pay €5 per doctor’s appointment, with some exceptions. Private care is more expensive. If you don’t in any way qualify for the national medical insurance, you’ll have to pay for your procedures and stuff, but the prices are reasonable usually.
As for liability insurance for medical malpractice and the police - I’m not 100% sure, but I do believe that victims get compensated by either the hospital, or the government in the case of the police. In any case, it’s very rare for anything like this to happen luckily.
I do believe life insurance that pays out if you die prematurely or get a major injury or disease, will still depend on your medical history - or at least whether you smoke and drink alcohol.
You do realize insurance companies were recently proven to be purchasing data secretly created from our own vehicles so they could raise rates, right? Not sure it “works” here in the US…