Via Cryptome. This statute has been reauthorized. Our limited understanding is that it makes the United States government the guarantor of insurance company losses due to terror atttacks over certain threshold amounts. Whether there’s a moral hazard – discouraging insurers and insureds from taking preventive and mitigating measures – we don’t know. We hope to return to this issue shortly. Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization.
Category Archives: insurance
When A Disaster Occurs to One Person At a Time – Is it still a Disaster?
If terrorists had invaded the Upper East Side and done this to several thousand people at once, perhaps we’d have a government fund – like the 9/11 fund, say – try to reduce the bureaucratic load, and make things run smoothly.
However, when it only happens to one person at a time – it doesn’t seem to elicit the same response.
For those not persuaded that the United States needs not only national health insurance – but also disability insurance – consider the case of Susan Barron. If you have any illusions about the weakness of New York’s crime victims compensation system – read this. From Jim Dwyer‘s piece on the front page of the Times of December 22nd, “In an Instant, a Life of Helping Becomes One in Need of Help“:
This was life, until Susan Barron crossed Second Avenue on a Saturday morning two and a half months ago: an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, where she has lived for decades. A fat Scottish terrier that she doted on. A psychology practice treating people with physical disabilities, offering “scholarships” to patients who could not pay full fees.
And she was a fixer — the friend who hunted down a kidney for someone in need of a transplant, mentor to a man starting his own therapy practice, regular volunteer on winter coat drives and at holiday soup kitchens. “That Jimmy Stewart character in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ had nothing on her,” said one friend, a self-described cynic.
Then came the morning of Oct. 6. A few minutes before 11, a deranged man stole five knives from a restaurant on Second Avenue, stabbed the cook, then ran into the street. Ms. Barron, on a walk with the dog, happened into his path at 35th Street.
Screaming at her, the man chopped, hacked and stabbed her head and arms, straddling her after she fell to the street, picking up a new knife when he lost one from the force of his blows. The man, identified as Lee Coleman, was stopped only when an off-duty police officer shot him.
To those who witnessed it, the violence seemed to be a crime of toxic passion; they could not fathom the truth, that one total stranger had simply and suddenly set upon killing another.
They also could not imagine that Ms. Barron would live.
She did. Continue reading