Insurers enlisted in war on terrorist

Boston Globe:

Homeland Security officials in the Bush administration are considering ways to use the insurance industry as a free-market-friendly vehicle to drive chemical facilities, food companies, utilities, and other businesses to take greater precautions against terrorist attacks without heavy-handed new regulations.

The concept of using insurance to spur companies to spend on counterterrorism measures may solve a vexing homeland security problem: Despite improvements the government has made to upgrade security at public facilities since the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks, 85 percent of American infrastructure is privately owned and underprotected.

Any attack on chemical, ground transportation, banking, food, energy, or utility sectors could cause massive destruction and cripple the economy. But companies have lobbied hard to defeat legislation to force them to upgrade their security practices, finding allies among free-market Republicans in Congress.

Proponents hope the insurance proposal will be a sweeping solution to the impasse. The basic idea would be to have the government or each industry develop a minimum set of security "best practices." Then, insurers would audit companies for compliance with those standards, with the power to reduce premiums for those who comply.


When one part of the free market fails to take responsible action another part steps in to force it. The business still does not have to do anything, but if it fails to do what is required its insurance premiums will go up or it will operate with out insurance, which would tend to concentrate the mind on what the risks are.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more