00:00The two trillion dollar home insurance crisis is freaking Americans out so much
00:03that even some conservatives are turning into socialists.
00:06The comparison shopping site Insurify recently surveyed a sample of homeowners about insurance.
00:11What they found was eye-opening.
00:13Nearly half of them want banks to make home insurance optional for people with mortgages.
00:16An even bigger percentage want the government to limit how much insurers can raise premiums.
00:21It gets even less capitalistic from there.
00:23About a third of homeowners want a government-run insurer to compete with the private ones.
00:27And about a quarter of them want to abolish private insurers altogether
00:30and just nationalize the whole business, Soviet-style.
00:33It's notable that these percentages are pretty much the same
00:35for people who call themselves liberals and conservatives.
00:38How did we get here?
00:39Insurance premiums have jumped 69% in six years
00:41as the number of billion-dollar weather disasters has soared.
00:44And some insurers have fled from hard-hit places like California, Florida, and Louisiana,
00:48making it even harder for people to get coverage, even if they can't afford it.
00:52As a last resort, millions have been forced to join state-run insurers,
00:55which often have expensive plans with bare-bones coverage.
00:58And about 14% of homeowners have no insurance at all,
01:01leaving them vulnerable to a total loss and a catastrophe.
01:04The U.S. isn't going to get banks to make insurance optional, full stop.
01:07They don't want to take that total loss on your house either.
01:09And it's going to be politically hard to pass laws capping insurance premiums.
01:13Abolishing private insurance companies will probably have to wait
01:15until we're in a world of fully automated luxury communism.
01:19But some nationalization could be possible at the rate we're going.
01:21We already did this with flood insurance, setting up the National Flood Insurance Program.
01:25Maybe we could expand that to wind, wildfires, and severe storms.
01:29Capitalists might not like that, but the longer they drag their feet on real solutions to this problem,
01:33the less they're going to like what happens next.
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