Insurance? We don’t need no stinking flood insurance!
Our neighbors just received over $7,000 from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to compensate them for the basement flood damage they received in the recent 50-year record rainfall here in Massachusetts. They really did suffer considerable damage: a new furnace, a new hot water heater, a long motel stay, etc. but could not persuade their insurance company to pay for their losses … even though they had a flood rider. Other friends got an unspecified (but possibly equivalent) FEMA recompense for considerably less real damage … but here they had no flood insurance coverage. We also got a $2,000 FEMA settlement for redoing a basement floor and other tradesmen visits. We also had no flood insurance.
Now the question that rises out of this largess is: why would anyone buy flood insurance when the Federal government is willing, nay eager to pay citizens for loss of this type? Since our government seems prone to declare disasters much more readily than in times past, I would suggest that private flood insurance has been usurped by taxpayer-funded vote buying. I surmise that, in the first instance mentioned above, the insurance company was reluctant to pay anything out to our neighbors since it knew that a federal disaster had been declared and therefore FEMA could step in its stead.
While we are not now ready to give this $2,000 FEMA settlement back, I do suffer from a guilt pang for helping, in our small way, to push our federal debt load into the multi-multi-trillion dollars. I rationalize this angst by mimicking Rush Limbaugh (“exhibiting absurdity by being absurd”) in that, “I decry greed by being greedy.”
