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> If there's money leftover, we give it back to causes

I grabbed that quote from the web site. With State Farm if there is money left over they give it back. While donating to causes is great, since you want to avoid doing that it just looks like marketing.

We've really bad fires in CA in the last few years. I think claims were in the $12B range from the 2018 fires. What happens to Lemonade when there is a mass causality like this and many insured make claims at the same time?



I'm not too knowledgeable about insurance in general, but from the S1 they say "At Lemonade, excess claims are generally offloaded to reinsurers". So, I'd assume if too many people start making claims, they themselves have insurance against that happening.


Turtles all the way down?


Presumably reinsurance claims are less frequent, and thus have some sort of different pricing structure.

The wikipedia page on the subject is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinsurance


Links to this, which must be the coolest-sounding organization in the entire insurance industry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Society_of_Catas...


Oh but you haven't heard of the 'Equitable Life Assurance Society'. Not just an organisation but a proper business until the 21st century.

Originally the "Society for Equitable Assurances on Lives and Survivorships", but obviously that wasn't hip enough to survive past the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Equitable_Life_Assurance_S...


They are betting on the federal government stepping in. It's somewhat understood that it's impossible to insure against natural disasters of that scale. The payouts for normal fires or car accidents in an average year is predictable over the claim term.

Natural disasters don't work that way. Insurance companies might go 10 years without a major claim, then suddenly there's a major disaster and 10% of their customers have claims that far exceed the value collected by the policies over several terms.


The reinsurance industry quite frequently handles claims like wildfire and hurricanes without needing federal government help.




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