TAYLOR: “People who played by the rules … got screwed”

TAYLOR: “People who played by the rules … got screwed”

They read us down there in the Deep South. And that could maybe save Barnstable property owners a pocket full of money on home insurance. All it might take is a national coastal coalition of fed-up ratepayers.
Unfortunately, costal homeowners, despite all their griping and little else, aren’t that easy to coalesce.
We got a note from a Mississippi congressman’s office after our business page carried an interview recently on Paula Aschettino’s 6,000-strong, grass roots Citizens’ for Homeowners’ Insurance Reform, which has been jousting with this state and insurers for several years over the roughly 400 percent increase in the Cape’s coastal insurance premiums and/or blatant abandonment by private insurers.
The office of U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi’s 4th District, which was pummeled into crisis by Katrina, wanted us to get them in touch with Mrs. Aschettino. We did. But we also perused the congressman’s Web site containing considerable information about insurers and their propensity to, in the congressman’s terms, “screw” the premium payers.
“People who played by the rules and expected insurance companies to play by the same rules got screwed,” Taylor, a Democrat and ex-Coast Guard search and rescue boat skipper, has said in the wake of Katrina. But more than talk, he has filed a bill, HR-1264, the Multiple Peril Insurance Act of 2009 that, in summary, would allow coastal homeowners for the first time to buy a comprehensive government policy that covers flood and wind damage, which is not now the case.
That would end, he says, the private insurance industry’s “lengthy disputes over how much damage was caused by wind and how much by flooding,” a legal knot that has slowed or negated payment of claims and impeded recovery from the storm’s devastation to this day.

Patriot
10/16/9