Steve Pearce: “I am supportive of the TRIA concept in general. I understand the market is not yet where it needs to be. As I explained…”

“I am supportive of the TRIA concept in general. I understand the market is not yet where it needs to be. As I explained in committee, our company was one of the companies who had to renew our insurance 30 days after 9/11. On October 11 every year we had to renew insurance. So we were some of the first to encounter the problem that some insurances simply weren't going to write insurance if we did not have some solutions. So I understood the concept. But we put into place some legislative changes that were slowly moving the marketplace to where it needed to be. And the market was responding. The marketplace was increasing the deductible percentages. The trigger limit was raised between the first two versions of the TRIA bill, and the industry retention level was raised, the Federal co-share was lowered, and those were all positive signs because we all recognized that the last thing we want to do is have, say, an agency like the Postal Service in charge of risk insurance. It does not meet the standards for a very mobile market. So in the long term, we would like to have the private sector handling this problem.”