United States needs disaster policy, say NAMIC leaders

20 July 2018

chuck-namic

In a recent episode of A.M.BestTV, Chuck Chamness (pictured), president and chief executive officer, and Jimi Grande, senior vice president, of the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC) said the U.S. government’s response to disasters has been inconsistent and driven by politics. Click here to view the entire programme.

In the programme Chamness and Grande say that they believe that focusing on resilience and establishing a policy would substantially help to solve the problem.

Speaking on the issues raised in the interview, Shaun Tarbuck, CEO of ICMIF said: “Governments around the world need to be planning long-term and building resilience into their policies rather operating a “pay-as-you-go” disaster policy. The Insurance Development Forum (IDF) is working hard to raise this issue on a global level as governments look to the insurance sector for more long-term disaster risk solutions and the IDF has the full support of ICMIF in these endeavours”.

In the programme Chamness said: “Today too often, we have situations like post-Superstorm Sandy where we have a regional group of state delegations from the affected area asking us to help them rebuild,” said Chamness. “When that happens, you then have a federal response organized through Congress and done through a special appropriation, which is very political, not very well-planned and often very wasteful.”

Grande said: “Presently, we are working with Washington to try to start to shift some of their resources from post-disaster to pre-disaster. We could have places that were devastated, like Houston and Rockport, rebuild using modern science and techniques to survive storms, as well as mitigate the amount of damage and the loss of life and property.”

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Watch interviews by A.M.BestTV recorded during the ICMIF Meeting of Reinsurance Officials (MORO) 2018 here.

Watch interviews by A.M.BestTV recorded during the ICMIF Biennial Conference 2017 here.

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