>>... I will admit my brain immediately went "so this is basically just pandemic insurance then, neat".
Huh, that's an interesting point.
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>>I bet they had other barriers in the way of getting payouts (not like insurance doesn't)
I guess the problem with infectious-disease insurance is that all of the insurance company's bets are correlated with each other: during a pandemic a large percentage of its policies all try to claim at roughly the same time and it goes bankrupt. That gives it extra incentive to try to wriggle out of things, plus to an extent there'd be the usual disability-insurance problem of "the time you most need the money is the time you are least capable of jumping through bureaucratic hoops".
Overall I think it's probably better in many modern cases to hold pandemic insurance in the form of physical objects that will be more useful to own when a pandemic hits, like stocks of canned goods and soap and air filters: much harder for an insurance company to wriggle out of that. But if you move around a lot, or have financial/psychological trouble maintaining stockpiles of even guaranteed-useful assets (you can always use the soap for regular handwashing), or you're a native of the 1890s and are so bewildered by what's going on that you can't really do much of anything to prevent it from hitting you, I can see the appeal of a more flexible money-based policy.
no subject
Huh, that's an interesting point.
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>>I bet they had other barriers in the way of getting payouts (not like insurance doesn't)
I guess the problem with infectious-disease insurance is that all of the insurance company's bets are correlated with each other: during a pandemic a large percentage of its policies all try to claim at roughly the same time and it goes bankrupt. That gives it extra incentive to try to wriggle out of things, plus to an extent there'd be the usual disability-insurance problem of "the time you most need the money is the time you are least capable of jumping through bureaucratic hoops".
Overall I think it's probably better in many modern cases to hold pandemic insurance in the form of physical objects that will be more useful to own when a pandemic hits, like stocks of canned goods and soap and air filters: much harder for an insurance company to wriggle out of that. But if you move around a lot, or have financial/psychological trouble maintaining stockpiles of even guaranteed-useful assets (you can always use the soap for regular handwashing), or you're a native of the 1890s and are so bewildered by what's going on that you can't really do much of anything to prevent it from hitting you, I can see the appeal of a more flexible money-based policy.