You must log in or register to post a comment. August 31, 2026 / Jenny Brown Enlarge or shrink text login or register to comment After management said heat mitigation was out of their hands, workers at a Phoenix, Arizona, Panda Express…
Page A12From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
State Farm banked $1.4 billion as weather claims worsened while Congress weighs killing the heat-safety rule.
As it ran on the front
Let's do the math they don't want you doing out loud. State Farm made one point four billion dollars in profit during a stretch when, according to the same unsealed records, weather and roof claims got worse. Not despite the storms — through them. Every roof that failed, every hail claim that came in higher than the year before, ran straight through a company that still walked away one point four billion dollars ahead. That's not a company absorbing risk. That's a company pricing risk so precisely that the worse the weather gets, the better the math works out on their end.
Now put next to it the other headline: Congress may kill the OSHA heat standard. That's the rule that says if you're outside working — roofing, paving, picking, building — in dangerous heat, your employer has to give you water, shade, and breaks before you drop. Not after. Before. It exists because people have died waiting for 'before' to become policy. And it's on the chopping block the same season an insurance company is unsealing records showing it made a billion four off the exact climate pattern that makes that rule necessary in the first place.…
…(cont) Nobody's saying State Farm wrote the OSHA bill. That's not the point. The point is you've got one industry getting rich off a hotter, wetter, harder planet, and you've got the one rule that protects the guy on the roof from that same planet getting torched by the people who take money from that industry. The heat doesn't care about your premium. The roofer up there in July doesn't get a payout when he goes down. He gets an ambulance bill, if he's lucky.
This is the trick, and it's not subtle once you see it stated plainly: the risk gets priced and profited from at the top, and the protection gets stripped away at the bottom, and both of those things happen in the same climate, the same year, sometimes the same news cycle. You're not imagining the connection. It's sitting in the same unsealed filing and the same committee calendar. The guy paying for both ends of it is the guy on the roof and the guy filing the claim, and increasingly, they're the same guy.
“An insurer pockets $1.4 billion while the claims for storm and roof damage keep getting worse — the model works exactly how it's supposed to for shareholders, terribly for anyone filing a claim. Now Congress might scrap the one rule protecting workers from the heat causing half those storms. That's the whole racket in two headlines.”
“State Farm's reserves are a private business decision, and profitability during a hard market isn't evidence of anything but sound underwriting — the OSHA heat rule is a separate regulatory question about workplace standards, unconnected to insurance, up to Congress, not — well, both stories are about who absorbs the cost of a hotter planet, I suppose, but that's not really my department.”
The receipts
It seems State Farm has not been a good neighbor for quite a while, according to an NBC report.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.