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Deep Thought

February 25, 2010 9:49 pm 7 comments Views:

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The same Senate millionaires who love the free market and hate the thought of public health insurance are very happy to have a public option when it comes to federal flood insurance for their vacation properties.

7 Comments

  • PurpleGirl
    February 25, 2010
    9:58 pm

    Public option?… It’s a federal program because no private insurance company will insure shoreline properties. Hey, maybe we could add that program to the list of things that are cuttable. Ya think?

  • jawbone
    February 25, 2010
    11:09 pm

    Oh, snap!

    Great catch.

  • gmanedit
    February 26, 2010
    1:54 am

    You know what else private insurance won’t touch? Nuclear power plants (which, by the way, were originally sold to us as producing electricity “too cheap to meter”).

  • lambert strether
    February 26, 2010
    2:54 am

    Well, it’s not really a public option as the public option advocates understand the term, is it? As I understand it, floor insurance on flood plains is nearly unobtainable, which is why the Fed steps in. They’re actually making a market where there isn’t one to begin with.

    Granted, the extreme vagueness of “public option” from a policy standpoint makes this question really not answerable. Really, the only thing it does do is legitimize the role of private insurance, forever, by making failure to buy junk insurance a federal crime. So there’s that.

  • Tom
    February 26, 2010
    8:21 am

    Single-payer (or Medicare for ALL) is the only way to negate the insurance industry’s strangle-hold on health care (which they’ve managed to screw up royally so that now it’s a GIANT SCAM).

  • susie
    February 26, 2010
    10:36 am

    Flood insurance wasn’t unobtainable. It’s that in certain places, it was so expensive that people wouldn’t buy it. That’s why the government stepped in.

    And while the inland properties they insure (rivers, etc.) tend to be populated by the elderly and poor, the coastal properties are the vacation homes of the elite. I say, if these elite went on a diet and exercised regularly, they wouldn’t have to worry about floods and they wouldn’t need federal insurance!

    By the way, the program calls for forbidding the rebuilding of beachfront homes and letting them revert to dunes if they suffer more than a certain percentage (I forget what) of destruction from flooding. HOWEVER, since the people who own beachfront property tend to be doctors, lawyers and politicians, that has always been ignored.

  • steveeboy
    February 26, 2010
    11:49 am

    hey, don’t forget how they want tort reform except when it comes to suing your insurance company–right Trent Lott!?!?!?

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