Car and home insurance both have a socialized component. Check your policy for an “uninsured driver charge”. Similar concepts exist for home insurance. And we all pay for flood insurance as it’s heavily subsidized by tax dollars.

Uninsured driver protection is not socialized, everyone is just forced to pay for it, the state doesn’t pay it. And this requirement as well as minimum coverages will vary by state, for example, Florida doesn’t mandate it.

And honestly the fact about flood insurance even if it’s true is only an implementation detail.

The point stands: you can have strong insurance markets with multiple private options in a well regulated environment without being tied to your employer or just a public option.

> Uninsured driver protection is not socialized, everyone is just forced to pay for it, the state doesn’t pay it.

Being forced to pay for something to share the cost across a set of people is the definition of socialized. The implementation detail is that it’s shared by all purchasers of insurance as opposed to the population as a whole.

> The point stands: you can have strong insurance markets with multiple private options in a well regulated environment without being tied to your employer or just a public option.

There is no such market for flood insurance.

I don’t think it’s possible to fix the US medical insurance system without banning corporate health plans. It’s the only way to unify the risk pools. Not just removing the tax incentive for corporate plans, I mean banning the concept so that the pools are unified.

> Being forced to pay for something to share the cost across a set of people is the definition of socialized.

For some definition of socialized. I would argue that a transaction between two private entities in which there might be a minimum ceiling for some items is not “socialized”. Even if the minimum ceiling is enforced by the state.

We can argue all day about definitions but at the end of the day nothing is black and white: even if we agree that there’s some “socialized” extent in the private car/home insurance markets I think most would still not say that it is “socialized” in general.

Regarding flood insurance, yes, agreed, there’s no natural law that says that flood insurance must be a profitable business (hello global warming!) so the government steps in.