I am surprised this guy's homeowners insurance hasn't dropped him. A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard. Insurance companies hate anything with any risk, especially of injury to outside visitors.
> A few years ago I had to switch companies or be dropped for having a trampoline -- with a full net -- in my fenced backyard
Seriously? Wow, as a non-American I find that outrageous.
I wonder when they'll threaten to drop people for having coke in their fridge or water in their bathtub. After all, those things kill people every day! They're extremely dangerous.
In fairness, it's my understanding trampolines are really honestly fairly hazardous, despite their pedestrian appearance & our fond memories.
More than 1 million people went to emergency departments for trampoline-related injuries between 2002 and 2011, with nearly 300,000 of those injuries involving broken bones
approximately 900,000 consumer trampolines sold each year
Doing some extremely crude correlation- For every ten trampolines sold a year, one person will visit the ER that year, and for every thirty trampolines sold, one person will break a bone. Yeah, I can see why insurance doesn't like them.
They aren't saying you can't have one, they just don't want to cover them.
Taken to it's logical conclusion you can argue that every business is going to try and cut every possible cost and service to maximise profit.
Insurance is not about helping people cover expenses though, it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group. This does mean that if you are a stunt helicopter pilot then other people in a low risk pool may tell you that they don't want you in it anymore.
America has a whole bunch of weirdness around insurance law etc. so I can't really speak much as I'm foreign - but there are good reasons that insurers don't cover Skiing on default travel insurance for example - and it isn't to screw the consumer.
> it is about pooling risk for the benefit of the group.
AND making obscene profit for the insurance company.
I wish we had more things like this that were non-profit. An insurance non-profit could charge the same premiums as a company does today, then whatever "profit" they have left at the end of the year after expenses they just refund back to all customers as a percentage of their premiums.
Everyone would pay way less, all the employees still get paid the same, and we'd still have the benefit of pooling the risk.
I'd love to see more on the obscene profit side of this. Honestly - I've done some work on pricing, reserving, etc in insurance and spoken to practicing GI actuaries - the margins are just not that large.
Are you specifically pointing to US medical insurers (I cannot comment at all on that tbh beyond the fact that the whole system is problematic)?
What? That sounds crazy to a non-US person. Are you saying that if someone came to visit and hurt themselves on the trampoline they would charge your insurance for it?
Absolutely. I just opened my home policy online and I have $300,000 coverage for Personal Liability in addition to coverage of home, property, etc. The description for the Personal Liability insurance says:
"If a claim is made or a suit is brought against an insured for damages because of bodily injury or property damage caused by an occurrence to which this coverage applies, we will:
* Pay up to our limit of liability for the damages for which the insured is legally liable. Damages include prejudgment interest awarded against the insured; and
* Provide a defense at our expense by counsel of our choice, even if the suit is groundless, false or fraudulent. We may investigate and settle any claim or suit that we decide is appropriate. Our duty to settle or defend ends when the amount we pay for damages resulting from the occurrence equals our limit of liability."
Some people also take out a personal umbrella policy which covers personal liability beyond home or auto. For example, a former employer's daughter and a friend were in an auto accident. The parents of the friend sued my boss for personal injury on her behalf, and my boss had to pay about two million dollars. Her auto policy probably covered $100-500k of that, and the rest was covered by the umbrella policy.
In fact, the day the company I worked for went public, I was advised to get such an umbrella policy because I was now a target for such law suits. We could either stop having neighborhood kids in our house or get it added to our home insurance, but leaving things as they were was perceived as too risky. I don't have any way to quantify the risk, and obviously it's in the insurance company's interests for me to buy more insurance, but it definitely brought home how litigious a society we live in.
I wonder if the parent talked about in the article has a major umbrella policy. Jumping from the roof of that play house onto a trampoline seems kind of insane. Letting young children play on the roof of your house also seems crazy. Letting your kid beat up on my kid out of an attachment to your parenting philosophy is definitely not ok in my book.
I'm older than most people posting here, and I never did any of that as a child. I did do construction in the summers as a much older kid (the article describes 4 year olds on the roof of his house), and got hurt enough to go to the hospital three times, but these were the risks of the job.
Finally, this guy seems pretty sexist. It's ok for me to keep my little girls from bullying other children, but boys have to learn to defend themselves? Let me guess, is that because girls are expected to ask permission and behave nicely, but boys aren't?
"Boys will be boys" is usually the justification for excusing what would be considered battery, assault or harassment if the perpetrator was 18 or over.
All basically a consequence of private healthcare. Injured party will seek treatment in a hospital; hospital will seek to recover costs of treatment from their health insurance; their health insurer will seek to find someone else who could be held liable for the costs... which points back to the homeowner who will then pass it on to their home insurer. They then sue the trampoline manufacturer, the manufacturer countersue the injured party, the upshot is everyone has to pay higher insurance costs in order to cover all the legal fees. It's so much better than a single payer healthcare system.
I lived in a few EU countries so far, all of them with national health insurance. If someone got hurt in your backyard, then they would be taken to a hospital and....no bill would ever be produced. No one would even bother asking if you have house insurance, because any cost of treatment would be covered by the national health cover. I don't think my house insurance even includes coverage for things like this because it's so unheard of. Someone could still sue you for damage to their health, but first of all - court could order at most payment for any extra treatment(that's not already paid for by national health insurance) or maybe perceived loss of income. Multi-million-dollar cases where the actual loss is nowhere near that are not really a thing outside of US.
Thanks for the details. In the US, typical judgments go beyond just medical expenses. (pain and suffering, loss of work, etc) I think it will vary a lot between different states, too. I think a lot of the reason for this is because of insurance- I bet people that don't have insurance are far less likely to be sued for these types of incidents. But with the advent of insurance, has come an attitude of "oh well, they have insurance, so it won't cost them anything, it'll just be the insurance company that pays for it!". The insurance companies in turn use these large settlements/judgments to support their case for why you NEED their product. That is my theory, any way.
The US is more difficult because you no national health insurance.
Accident liability for healthcare are bucketed with health insurance, general liability insurance, auto insurance or workers compensation. If you hit a certain threshold with certain conditions, the insurance companies will try to pin the blame on somebody else.
When I had back surgery ($$$), they had investigators look into my background and called under various guises in an attempt to get me to say that I was injured in a minor car accident a few years earlier. Fortunately while I was present at the accident, I wasn't in the car (some dope slammed into my car in a parking lot). In the meantime, I was at risk of having care cutoff, as they refused to pay claims.
I'm from Finland. First, if someone came to jump on my trampoline and got hurt, the last thing they would do is to sue me. Secondly, if I did not intentionally and actively try to harm them it's quite hard to imagine a situation where I would have to pay damages - and in the unlikely case I had to the payment would be probably be a couple of thousands of euros (based on my cursory and anecdotal experience).
The only way to clock in millions of euros as penalty here would be some mini-enron like financial crime.
It would also be pretty insane to predatorily sue me for millions of euros. There is nowhere that money could come from.
Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).
> Generally public healthcare would pick up the tab on most medical costs (sans some mostly insignificant fees).
This gets to the heart of the problem. In the US this is not an option, so even people who generally are not litigious can need to sue in order to make sure medical bills are payed appropriately.
Even with that, personal injury settlements that clock into the millions of euros would be extreme outliers in the USA. It would involve severe death and dismemberment as well as punitive action by the civil court process.
Insurance companies want nothing to do with attractive nuisances; they'd much prefer you live in a padded cell, drawing a paycheck and paying your bills. In short, they are scum.
A successful entrepreneur who had sold businesses could theoretically just self insure. If you have paid off your house, you don't technically need home insurance (though this guy would be silly not to have it).