Is the world becoming uninsurable?

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.

Price caps always seem like such a transparent political move.

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.

Insurance companies have pretty thing profit margins regardless, even in areas where profits are not capped. It's a competitive marketplace!

I'm not sure I believe your factoid. Can you cite? UHC is one of the wealthiest companies in the world.

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]

[0] https://pnhp.org/news/insurers-avoid-loss-ratio-limits-by-sh...