Wendy Sherman: “I rise to offer an amendment that is coauthored by Chairman Bachus and by my friend Gregory Meeks from New York. It is a…”

“I rise to offer an amendment that is coauthored by Chairman Bachus and by my friend Gregory Meeks from New York. It is a bipartisan and, I hope, noncontroversial amendment. This flood insurance program is usually a partnership between private companies and the Federal Government. The Write Your Own Program involves the companies servicing the policies. And one major company that used to write policies in this area decided to pull out of the program and turned over 800,000 policies to the Federal Government. The whole idea behind the program is that the Federal Government will administer as few of these insurance policies as possible. The purpose of this amendment is to require that the vast majority of these policies be made available to be handled by private insurance companies. It is simply a privatization amendment. This includes language in the amendment designed to protect the agents of State Farm, which is the company that is no longer in this business, ensuring that they will be able to continue servicing the policies that shift from the Federal Government to private insurance companies. This is an effort to ensure that these policies are taken off the taxpayers' books without interfering in the relationship between consumers and their insurance agents. I would hope that this would be a noncontroversial amendment. As I said, it is supported by the chairman of the committee and is offered on his behalf as well as the gentleman from New York (Mr. Meeks).…”