Since becoming Sop’s partner on slabbed, it’s been a continuing challenge to apply my background in health insurance to the post-Katrina issues of property insurance. Being uninsured can be hazardous to your health lightened my load today.
...insurance is not just a luxury. It can be a matter of life and death.
While a lack of health insurance can literally be a matter of life and death, the meaning can be both literal and figurative when applied to property issues of property insurance – evident in the survey data collected in Ocean Springs as well as in the increase in suicides on the Coast – an increase similar to that I suspect will also surface in violent death rates and/or incidence of physical violence.
A better understanding of the interrelated nature of physical health and financial health – and the differences in the way these two different systems of insurance function – is fundamental to a solution for the current health care financing crisis and the growing crisis in the property insurance industry.
Segregated thinking about the two is an example of idealogy defeating reasoning – a phrase I borrowed from Journal editor Lloyd Gray with different meaning applied.
Publicly funded health care, intended to be humanitarian in nature, has become a dumping ground for the insurance industry that’s driving up the cost of health care to the point that it’s no longer affordable for many – including many states.
In yet another example of the endless repetition of history, property insurance is heading the same way.
When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong, these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
Katrina was the jarring gong. Think about that, I am.