Is the world becoming uninsurable?

It's happened before. Chicago's reaction to the Great Fire was simple - no more building wooden houses. Chicago went all brick. Still is, mostly.

The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

I live in a house built of cinder block filled with concrete reinforced with steel. A commercial builder built this as his personal residence in 1950. The walls look like a commercial building. The outside is just painted cinder block. Works fine, survived the 1989 earthquake without damage, low maintenance. It's not what most people want today in the US.

Allowing insurers to make a profit and run a business without interference is going to be cheaper - and in most instances better - than whatever the politicians are trying to build here. If you get rid of all the mandatory-this and price-gouging-thats then to stay in business insurers have sell products that people want to buy at a competitive yet sustainable price. It works for food, it'd work here too.

I always found it funny when insurance marketing talks about "personalized rates", when the goal is to DE-PERSONALIZE the risk. If you have 10,000 customers in Los Angeles, and 5 million elsewhere, you can either isolate the LA customers and charge them the "real" price of the risk, which will be unviable as a business and probably politically touchy too, or you can include them in the broad pool, and the people with a full-cinderblock home in a non-flammable state pay $20 more a year so the entire endeavour can work.

The concept probably works better if you have some concept of social cohesion to lean on-- you might not get the best possible outcome personally, but the system itself is more robust for everyone.

If one pool of people are taking a bad deal vs the market rate when buying insurance then it isn't really insurance any more. It is a transfer payment a.k.a. welfare. Which is cool and all in the sense that welfare is a social tool that exists. But calling it 'insurance' is needlessly polluting the language. If people expect to hoover money off others then they should be charged more until the expected return of everyone in the insured pool is equal. If the payouts are going to be held equal in the event of a disaster then that means the price of insurance has to vary depending on the risk profile of the customers.

Its called solidarity and yes, it means some people NOT have to pay more but others recieve more. Paul AND Peter get the security of disaster coverage in exchange. This is what you pay for. A big risk pool and not your individual disaster recovery.