What a wonderful idea. I suspect Dagwood Bumstead said it best, "That is a good idea-if you don't think about it."

Insurance companies collect premiums and invest money so they can pay out loses when something bad occurs. They take a risk. The problem is our collections are exposed to excessive mischief. Would anyone insure something that died that easily? How could they know it was stolen? How could they determine the value? How could one differentiate between intrinsic value to the creator and the extrinsic market value to others? No matter how you look at it insuring something so nebulous is an exercise in futility. I would speculate that if you did get insurance and had one loss they would never cover you again. The risk is too great. The protection is too meager. Any adjuster looking at our security measures would likely turn you down.

Would we be prepared to engage the kinds of security protection that an insurer would reasonably expect as some assurance that they are making a good business decision. Being in business to make money is not evil. Ripping you off is.

It is possible that an organization, such as ABS, could appeal for group insurance where every member paid and all were covered. The loss potential as we currently know it could be tolerable to the carrier. That is the good news. Only because there are so many of us with so much bonsai the relative losses are not that large. Of course that is nationwide, the individually we might not feel that way. However, could they deal with the few who have enormous collections, and those with a few? How could they differentiate proportionally to the value of a given bonsai or collection? The value of any collection can change dramatically during a year; trees brought to full bonsai beauty, bonsai that die, new additions to your collection, sale of others, disease, insects, the list is endless. Anyway you look at it, the complications are so enormous it is hard to imagine such a possibility.

Would you insure someone else's bonsai? Anyone is encouraged to try. Let's not wait for that answer to the problem of stolen bonsai-clearly, it is not a solution.