INSURANCE: Do your homework

We hear it everyday, how “the private sector should handle all our insurance needs.” OK, that’s a wonderful sound bite, but what if this same “private sector insurance company” would rather not insure someone or someone’s property? Shall we have the government be the insurer of last resort? Or do they go uninsured, or do insurance companies get to decide where we can and can’t live? And isn’t that socialism?

Look at the homeowners insurance industry. Almost every Idahoan’s dream is to live on acreage in the forest where the deer and the antelope play (OK, Montana more so for antelope), but those properties are becoming increasingly difficult to insure, and fewer and fewer companies want to insure anything more risky than a concrete box house in the suburbs two blocks from the fire department. Too many go uninsured. Mobile homes are now even harder to insure in parks! And rental property landlord policies are now 1 percent minimum deductibles with many insurers. And all the lucky people that live outside fire districts entirely, or worse yet, off the electrical grid? Forget about it. I know of two uninsured homes and apartment buildings lost in the last few months inside fire districts.

At the very least, won’t taxpayers have to step up for the uninsured when there is a catastrophic wildfire through programs like FEMA or government backed mortgages to rebuild? Because the “private sector” is always right, right?

In 2006, an insurance company CEO claimed post-Hurricane Katrina that 85 percent of Americans live in coastal U.S. counties, and proceeded to non-renew millions of policies even though the insurance industry still made $44.8 billion in the year of Katrina (an 18.7 percent increase from the previous year). Did you know insurance companies have what is called “re-insurance” for catastrophic losses which may explain the hefty post Katrina profits? It cracks me up that an itty-bitty Kalispell based insurance company can beat the big players’ rates by 40 or 50 percent because of re-insurance and efficiency.

Idahoans need to know there is a big difference between insurance companies, and to be frank, too many just want the gravy no-risk policies and to let taxpayers ultimately cover what they deem uninsurable. As Idahoans, we should only renew our homeowners and bundle the high profit auto policies with companies that still support our Idaho way of life, and abandon companies that just want the risk free gravy policies. Who are they? Buy a house (or a mobile) in the country and you’ll find out real quick!

MIKE RENO

Post Falls