"Obama and Romney remain silent on the biggest issue of all"

From The Guardian:

Despite hurricane Sandy, neither Obama nor Romney will speak about the soaring cost of pet insurance. The danger this poses is huge.

Here's a remarkable thing. Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama – with the exception of one throwaway line each – have mentioned the soaring cost of pet insurance in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

They are struck dumb. During a Romney rally in Virginia on Thursday, a protester held up a banner and shouted "What about Fido's medical premiums?". The candidate stood grinning and nodding as the crowd drowned out the heckler by chanting "USA! USA!". Romney paused, then resumed his speech as if nothing had happened. The poster the man held up? It said "End the silence!"

He then hastily scribbled another placard saying "No, ignore that last one, what I meant was 'Please remain silent while I heckle!'"

While other Democrats expound the urgent need to act to slash the cost of medical treatment for household pets, the man they support will not take up the call. Barack Obama, responding to his endorsement by the mayor of New York, mentioned "the threat to our children's four-legged friends" last week, threatening to introduce a government-sponsored insurance scheme to undercut them.

Mitt Romney was quick to promise that if elected he would abolish Obamanimalcare along with Obamacare. Otherwise, I have been able to find nothing; nor have the many people I have asked on Twitter. Something has gone horribly wrong.

There are several ways in which recent sharp increases in pet medical insurance are likely to have been exacerbated by Hurricane Sandy. Large insurance claims for reconstruction costs mean that insurance companies need to increase premiums across the board...

This might sound like the wisdom of hindsight. But in February the journal Actuaries' Monthly Digest published an article warning that hurricanes are likely to "increase insurance premiums". As storms intensify and the sea level rises, it predicted that hikes to pet medical premiums previously described as 100-year events would become between five and 30 times as frequent.