(Photo: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
“The growing insurance crisis illustrates the vital importance of seeing climate change as a risk to the entire financial system,” said one watchdog group.
With extreme weather disasters increasing in frequency and intensity as the global climate crisis rages, wealthy homeowners in some coastal areas of the United States are paying six figures a year to insure their houses against flooding and other impacts of the kind that Hurricane Idalia brought to Florida last week.
Bloomberg‘s Felipe Marques and Devon Pendleton reported Thursday that the owner of a $50 million mansion on Florida’s Star Island was given a $622,000-per-year quote for home insurance.
“Granted, that was a recent quote for a policy on one of the ultraluxe mansions on the Biscayne Bay island, where A-listers like Rick Ross, Ken Griffin, and Alex Rodriguez own homes. But, only last year, the same policy cost $200,000,” Marques and Pendleton wrote. “Even for the moderately wealthy, insurance costs […]
This is wonderful news! The adequate pricing of risk and value is needed to direct people towards more rational and prudent choices. What we will need to guard against is the operationalization of corruption by the wealthy by having their representatives execute laws and policies which cost shift to the taxpayers for benefits they accrue due to their wealth status.