Within the last nine months in California, and even going before that, tens of thousands of people have lost their insurance policies, the fire policy, not the rest of your homeowners insurance, just anything that covers fire and it’s because the insurance companies can do it. Nobody is stopping them.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Farron, we can’t do a show without talking about the fires in California. This takes a little bit of time to discuss this case because it’s so confusing. We start off, it’s not really confusing, it’s there’s so many issues that you don’t know which one to grab a hold of. If I’m writing a story, even an op-ed, if I’m writing that, there are so many layers to this story. The first layer to me is the whole insurance scam. We want to write insurance in your state. We really want to, but we only want to write it in areas where we won’t lose money, where we can collect all the money and we don’t have to pay out any money. In some states like Florida and California and some other folks are saying, wait a second, you want to do business in this state, you take the good with the bad. It’s an investment you’re making into our state. There’s plenty of places in California where State Farm and Allstate and Farmers, these insurance companies make plenty of money. So it’s just like a stock, isn’t it? You may have some bad stocks, but you’re parlaying them with good stocks. And that’s what they’re saying here, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And within the last eight, nine months here in California, and even going before that though, we’ve had tens of thousands of people lose their policies from these, the fire policy, not the rest of your homeowners insurance, just anything that covers fire.
Mike Papantonio: 100,000 since 2019. 100,000 people.
Farron Cousins: And it’s because the insurance companies can do it. Nobody is stopping them. And you pointed out a great thing here, here in the state of Florida, we’ve been dealing with the same issue. These insurance companies have said, wow, it’s just too great of a risk with the hurricanes and the flooding. So we’re out. They straight up left our state. We have lost more than 20 major insurance companies, many of the ones you listed, in the last year, and that has left the few that remain to jack prices up so high. I have heard from countless people that have said, we have to leave. We’re leaving our home that we have raised our children in because we can’t afford insurance anymore. And the same thing is going to happen in California, because a lot of people look at this and they say, oh, celebrity, they have the money. They can rebuild their homes. Of course they can. Most of the people that are victims here are not celebrities. We have small businesses. We have average everyday working class people that now have nothing. And maybe something can come along to help them, but probably not all the way.
Mike Papantonio: There’s something real ugly taking place. You take the people, for example, in Eaton, most of the calls we’re getting are the Eaton area. That’s not celebrity-ville. These are just hardworking people. They’re average Americans, they own businesses, like you said. They had houses that maybe been in the family for two or three generations. Those are the people calling us. But what you’re hearing is you’re hearing the attack of the celebrity. That’s where the attack’s taking place. This ain’t a big deal because all it is is million, multi-millionaire celebrities who live in gated communities, and they’ve never had to confront something like this because fires hit ’em in the face here. The other argument that I’m hearing, well, these are the same people that they buy into all the liberal concepts of conservation or whatever it may be and reducing the numbers of fire departments, reducing the number of police, and now it’s hit ’em in the face. But the problem with that argument is that ignores the idea that you have thousands of people that don’t have anything to do with Hollywood celebrity that are affected by all this. And those are the calls we’re getting.
Farron Cousins: And this is not let’s, oh, it’s these evil, they deserve it. Oh, so sad for celebrities. People are are dying. There’s no end in sight that we can see right now. It’s absolutely horrific what’s happening and as the winds shift, then we look at new areas that are suddenly engulfed in flames. This is crazy. And look, the blame game is going to be going around for a long time.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, it is.
Farron Cousins: And it’s kind of me off because I think the one group that nobody’s blamed other than me is Nestle. You can’t talk about water in California without talking about Nestle.
Mike Papantonio: That is a fantastic argument.
Farron Cousins: It always goes to the top.
Mike Papantonio: Nestle, well, all the water companies, right? Two of the biggest billionaires living in California are in the water business, they’ve bought up all the water. Which is interesting, when you say you kinda get upset about the fact that all these blame games taking place, but there’s some big blame here. Okay. The thing that I don’t want everybody to miss, though, in the blame game is that what is the insurance, for example, let’s go back to insurance. What is the impact of an insurance company pulling out of California? Well, if you can’t get insurance, you can’t get mortgages. If you can’t get mortgages, the price and value of the property starts just dumping. There is no value to the property. And if you take that scenario, it affects the entire economy. No insurance, or I can’t afford insurance, means I can’t get a mortgage, means that the value of the property plummets. How does that affect the entire economy? So this is a bigger question. You can’t just look at this and say, those celebrities, who gives a. That’s what I’m hearing a lot.
