mitigatedchaos said: maybe but if we care about offsetting risks and pricing them in, then by putting insurance we set a more market-based assessment of that
in theory yes, although in practice it just lifts the regulation up one level to apply to the insurance company instead.
@collapsedsquid: then you have to regulate the insurance as well
Well, you regulate the insurers, the insurers regulate the vendors. What’s perhaps lacking is a high-cost no rules insurance option.
The thing being that if the risk of actual poisonings is low, then once spread out over the population it, hypothetically, shouldn’t cost that much. And if it’s high and the state is responsible for healthcare, selling w/o insurance is potentially a form of free riding.
A lot of these things, we wouldn’t care if people did risky things if we didn’t have to pay for it or strain our empathy because we insisted we not pay for it but they don’t have $$$ for it either.