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Insurance agent warns, ‘Don’t drain the crop insurance pool’
A leader in the crop insurance industry in Iowa has a warning for Congress and the Trump Administration.
“Don’t drain the crop insurance pool.”
Bill Pearson owns and operates HP Insurance in Sibley, Iowa and also chairs the Independent Insurance Agents of Iowa Rural Agents Conference. Pearson says proposals to cap crop insurance subsidies would increase insurance costs for larger farms and reduce participation by agriculture’s “least risky” operations.
“It would be like having everyone who doesn’t have a car accident being kicked out of the insurance pool, leaving only the people having insurance—needing insurance—who have a lot of accidents,” Pearson says. “That would drive up costs for everyone involved and it would actually end up putting more pressure on the taxpayers to come through with a disaster program. Which is not fair to the taxpayers, to have to foot the whole bill.”
Pearson says many critics of crop insurance don’t understand that farmers are active participants in funding their own safety net.
“The system works. It’s not broken,” he says. “So my advice is, let’s not try to fix something that isn’t broken.”
Legislation introduced in the U.S. House would limit federal crop insurance subsidies to 40-thousand dollars per farm, per year; eliminate the government’s share of paid premiums for all farmers with an adjusted gross income over 250-thousand dollars; and eliminate the Harvest Price Option from crop insurance. The Trump Administration’s fiscal 2018 budget proposes similar changes to crop insurance.
AUDIO: Bill Pearson
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