If the roof is beyond end-of-life they probably won't pay anything, as it's a predictable cost of owning a home not an unexpected loss which is what insurance is for. Same reason they won't pay to have a tree taken down just because it could fall and cause damage. You're supposed to maintain your property; insurance is for losses beyond normal wear and tear/maintenance expense.

Also if it is a part of the mortgage why doesn't the lender pay for it? They need it, not the homeowner.

Is insurance company affiliated with companies doing the repairs?

It's a funny business. Every insurer wants better risk assessment, since it's a competitive advantage. At the same time, the better the risk assessment gets, the less point there is to having insurance in the first place. At the limit, insurers that could accurately predict the future would charge you premiums equal to your actual future costs and you might as well just put the premiums in a savings account instead.

This is the point where you stop talking to the insurance company and start talking to an attorney as well as your state insurance commission.

Yes, but this does not imply that customers with (potentially vastly) different risk profiles should pay the same rates.

The canonical example is that 18-year-old single males with previous speeding tickets pay more for auto insurance than married 40-year-old women with clean driving records.

Why should someone who has an unpatched hole in their roof pay the same rate as someone who maintains their roof?

But then again, there's presumably some sort of balance. If someone insists on building and rebuilding in a flood or fire zone, it's not obvious that everyone else should see their premiums go up to cover that. One option is for the insurance company to just cease insuring the property(ies), but I suspect there's more overall negatives to that than if they bump the premiums of clients in specific locales.

Actuarial science is its own field that prices uncertain future events. As you’re bringing out here, the insurer has additional uncertainty as to the actual driving habits of their policyholders, so some conservatism is likely priced in. Aggressive drivers would like to pay the premiums of careful drivers.

This is related to the origin of GEICO, Government Employees Insurance Company. Back in the day, you had to be a state or federal employee for them to bind coverage. The investment thesis was that civil servants’ caution in their choice of employment was an accurate indication of their overall risk appetite and risk-taking behavior. GEICO was able price policies lower without going broke because they by design insured a lower-risk population.

Given that the annual premium is like 0.27% of the value of the policy, a change in risk of a few percent because some big tree limbs were hanging over the house or because some brushes might have enabled a fire to spread to the house more easily could clearly swamp the value of the premium to them.

And, to be clear, I didn't want to spend $2,000 to fix the problems, I would have rather not had to deal with it, but that's part of the joy of being a homeowner.

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We live in a place (California) where the government has generally prevented homeowners insurance companies from effectively charging for risk (e.g., wildfires) and therefore many companies have stopped writing policies altogether. This doesn't seem like a good outcome. Note that this is the same state that won't let auto insurers charge based on "black boxes" either, so good drivers are subsidizing bad drivers (even more than in other places).

But imposing heavier regulatory burdens has disproportionately adverse effects on smaller would-be competitors. The big, established players know this and actively engage in enlargement of regulatory scope and regulatory capture to widen their moats. Historical examples of this are Jeff Bezos encouraging states to be more aggressive in requiring sales tax levies on internet purchases and more recently the calls by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to “pace” AI through regulation. On the surface, they appear to be public-spirited moves but are deeply self-interested.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...

do you want comcast or comcast?