British Columbia forces you to buy liability insurance from the provincial government and it's awful. The premium calculations are illogical and inefficient. Bad drivers are subsidized by good ones, the rates are among the highest in the country and the govt manages to lose money on it.
My experience in other provinces with private insurance companies was much better.
That's likely not because of government inefficiencies, but because a small segment of the population is responsible for the vast majority of costs. Mostly drunk drivers, to be frank - but also that certain lovely category of individual who feels that societal rules don't apply to them.
Private insurers can say "fuck no, we're not insuring you, you've got 2 DUIs, 6 speeding tickets, and numerous equipment violations" or make the cost of that insurance absurdly expensive, pricing them out.
If the government is providing the insurance, they likely have to say "yes" to everyone. Waiving the requirement to insure everyone is well and good until someone looks at the data and sees that your completely non-discriminatory rules are effectively discriminating against certain classes of people.
> The premium calculations are illogical and inefficient. Bad drivers are subsidized by good ones
Good drivers subsidizing bad ones is the entire concept of an insurance pool. The corrective mechanism is that if a driver reveals themselves to be bad enough, you make them stop driving.
No, it's not. The premise of an insurance pool is that the lucky subsidize the unlucky. Differences in premiums are supposed to account for good vs bad.
> Differences in premiums are supposed to account for good vs bad.
This would require a way to measure driving quality with perfect accuracy and no errors. I feel comfortable in my claim that (1) nobody can do this; (2) nobody claims to be able to do this; and (3) nobody believes that this might one day be possible.
Differing premium rates just mean that you have several pools, each defined by their premium rate, in which the better drivers subsidize the worse ones.
My experience in other provinces with private insurance companies was much better.