Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and set prices individually based on that is useless. If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone. Whereas solidarity can bring a better society - which even those who have to occasionally pay more benefit from in the end.

> Insurance that is able to quantify risks precisely and set prices individually based on that is useless.

This is simply untrue.

This may be true for health insurance, because there is a strong moral case to be made that is unfair and illiberal to make people pay more for genetics or simple bad luck that result in them being likely to need more health care.

It is not true for home insurance, where people can choose where to live and choose what kind of housing to live in.

The purpose of home insurance is to reduce time-based variance for disaster, not for people in low-risk properties to subsidize people in high-risk properties.

It is not "solidarity" for someone in a steel-and-concrete house with a metal roof who clears brush and trees from around their house to subsidize someone who lives in wooden mansion who doesn't take any fire precautions. It is a perverse incentive.

> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.

Again, it is not the purpose of insurance for it to be positive expected value for people in high risk homes! It is expected for insurance to be negative expected value. The point is to reduce variance.

> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.

It is insurance. You pay money, the company takes away the risk. That doesn't make it a bad deal, that makes it a service. That is like complaining about a hypothetical garbage company that charges for taking away trash even though the trash might have some notional value.

Insurance isn't an investment scheme. If you want to pay money for a positive-expected-value deal, go buy stocks and bonds.

whole point of insurance is that you pay for avoiding risk

in other words, you pay more than you would on average loss from bad events - but you avoid catastrophic losses that would break your life

that is why insuring your phone is likely a bad idea (as you can pay for a new one) but liability insurance or insuring your home/flat may make sense

> If it has to make any profits - or at least pay salaries - it's guaranteed to be a bad deal for everyone.

paying 3k per year, to avoid 1% risk of 250k losses may be a good idea, especially if 3k loss is survivable without trouble and 250k loss would be more than 90 times worse.