The restaurants’ biggest foe is arguably the insurance lobby. … A vast number of the bars and restaurants on the brink o

“I just pray someone shuts us down,” says Atlanta restaurant owner Thurnher. “Please, shut me down for six to eight weeks. Let’s get this under control because I can’t take another year of just limping along like this, trying to keep a polite smile on my face while pleading with every third customer to please put on a mask.”

Elsewhere in the world, the Chinese government launched its own state-sponsored pandemic insurance program, and the German government elected to pay 70% of business interruption costs while forcing insurers to pay an additional 15%. The predominant French business interruption insurer agreed to pay business interruption claims for restaurants, and the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority sued eight major insurers to force the industry to at least respond to the claims in an orderly and transparent fashion. Meanwhile, American restaurants set up tables on sidewalks and hoped for the best. Most got enough funds to cover a few weeks through the PPP program, but the requirement to spend all the money within eight weeks of obtaining it even as restaurants were still shut down — which wasn’t relaxed until June — forced most restaurants to blow the money paying busboys and dishwashers to “work from home” before they were even allowed to open.

“We know from very recent history that insurance companies are explicitly too big to fail,” says Whitehouse. “Everyone who works for an insurance company will be fine. What we’ve effectively decided then as a political system, as a society, is that hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies are better than six or seven. We’ve decided that it’s okay that there’s an ever-growing population of the country that in an ever-expanding set of circumstances just gets no downside risk protection, even if they paid for it.”

Houghtaling was blown away. “The Titanic is sinking, and the industry is saying, ‘We may not have enough lifeboats, so we’re not gonna drop any of them,” he told a podcast in May. “It’s just morally wrong.” For Whitehouse, the Brooklyn liquor importer and a former compliance attorney at Goldman Sachs during the last economic crisis, it felt like a sadistic sequel to the $192 billion backdoor bailout of mega-insurer AIG that sent $17 billion straight to Goldman and the clients for whom it had purchased underpriced bond insurance on toxic mortgage securities on the eve of the subprime crash.

Tom Colicchio Spent 19 Years Building a Restaurant Empire. Coronavirus Gutted It in a Month. What it’s like to lay off nearly 300 employees — and rethink unchecked capitalismmarker.medium.com

The trouble was, each policy was legally its own special snowflake. Fighting just one could take years to move through the courts, and in the meantime, every chef Houghtaling represented could lose everything. He and a few celebrity chef friends, including Thomas Keller and Wolfgang Puck, began lobbying for federal legislation that would seek to incentivize insurance companies to pay the claims by offering taxpayer assistance to any insurance company that did so voluntarily — a backdoor bailout essentially. A Brooklyn liquor importer named Nate Whitehouse started a partner coalition called the THIRST Group to organize underemployed bartenders to push for similar legislation on a state level. By April, they had gotten the verbal support of the president himself, who told reporters he would like to see “the insurance companies pay if they need to pay, if it’s fair.” The insurers responded by circulating an “analysis” juxtaposing the cost of covering all Covid-19-related “closure losses” for businesses with fewer than 500 employees at somewhere between $393 billion and $668 billion per month with the insurance industry’s total surplus reserves of “roughly $800 billion.”

But if they felt uneasy about some of their partner’s behaviours, they let them go. They were in love, after all. And they had no idea those behaviours were a sign of where the relationship was heading.

Twelve insurance industry lobbyists converged over the summer to eighty-six a bill Houghtaling backed that would have used taxpayer funds to reward insurers that paid their business interruption claims. Over the spring and summer, Whitehouse’s group ultimately helped convince state senators in 10 states to introduce bills that would have forced insurers to pay certain claims, but “everywhere we showed up, like a dozen insurance industry lobbyists would come out of the woodwork,” he says. None of the bills made it to the floor.

The industry’s Covid-19 strategy was a simpler scheme because it didn’t involve any individual assessments that would need to be altered. It was also a longer shot because each policy was different, and more than half by that point did have virus exclusions that various insurers had inserted into boilerplate contracts after the industry paid out at least $64 million in claims to Hong Kong hotels whose occupancy had plunged during the 2003 SARS epidemic.

“I just pray someone shuts us down,” says Atlanta restaurant owner Thurnher. “Please, shut me down for six to eight weeks. Let’s get this under control because I can’t take another year of just limping along like this, trying to keep a polite smile on my face while pleading with every third customer to please put on a mask.”

The restaurants had one important figure in their corner: flamboyant New Orleans trial lawyer John Houghtaling, who owns 17 Ferraris, is married to Russian pop star wife Julia Timonina, and lives in a literal palace in which his daughter sleeps on a bed that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Houghtaling is best known for uncovering a conspiracy in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy whereby engineering reports were doctored to appraise destroyed properties to attribute damages to causes other than the storm. It was a scheme that denied coverage to thousands of homeowners — a particularly egregious act given that flood insurance claims have been fully paid by the federal government since 1968.

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idea of “finding your soulmate” have one hand in your wallet. Finding your soulmate is not the answer to relationship happiness — every partnership takes effort. The truth is, there are plenty of people who’d be a great partner for you. And there are plenty who would gain much from being with you. Adopting that belief will set you free.

With each passing month, it has become clearer, however, how little has changed since the AIG bailout. The insurance industry is, by and large, raking in record profits. The 827 registered lobbyists it employs in Washington alone have been hard at work all pandemic to help craft a multi-trillion-dollar federal rescue package that has some problematic parts. It would earmark hundreds of billions of dollars in grants for nursing homes and hospitals and $60 billion for airlines with virtually no official mandate that either industry has to curtail its services or dramatically alter operations in favor of public health; it proposes dozens of liability protections for institutions that may have neglected that duty; and there’s even a scheme that would have given every laid-off worker free COBRA despite the conspicuous existence of two well-known government-run health insurance programs that could have done the same job far more cheaply.

Houghtaling found plenty of holes in the arguments. Many of the virus exceptions were dubious, he says, and as many as a third made no mention whatsoever of the term. Extensive research suggested that the virus could linger on surfaces for weeks, arguably meeting even the insurance industry’s narrow definition of “physical damage or loss.” Many of his personal friends were chefs who had bought pricer “all risk” policies that contained no exclusions whatsoever, and some businesses had even invested in policies that explicitly covered “pandemic events” in order to “fill in the gaps that [other insurers] creatively exclude or do not address.” In a lawsuit filed against Lloyd’s of London, one Houston restaurant chain claimed that it paid the insurer $40,000 for $1 million in “pandemic event” insurance only to be advised on March 18 that Covid-19 was “not covered under the Pandemic Event Endorsement as it is not a named disease on that endorsement.”

And so instead of relief, small restaurants got a late summer punctuated by periodic outbreaks and shutdowns that gave way to a second wave of shutdowns; hourly confrontations with customers who refus