The Senate passed on Thursday a farm bill that took two years to complete. Most of the discussion around the bill—and the reason for the delay—concerns the level of cuts to food stamps, which wound up at $8.7 billion over 10 years (about 1 percent of the overall program). But while the parties argued about how much food to take away from poor people, it’s just as revealing to look at the area where they both agreed. Democrats and Republicans alike have pointed to the repeal of $4.5 billion in annual direct cash payments, a long disfavored policy where farmers received a fixed amount of money for every acre they owned, regardless of whether it was planted. The Senate will “end outdated and unnecessary subsidies,” said lead Democratic negotiator Debbie Stabenow on Monday. Her Republican counterpart, House Agriculture Committee chair Frank Lucas, once supported direct payments, but highlighted their repeal upon House passage of the bill. “Don’t underestimate the magnitude of the reforms,” he said last week.

But don’t be fooled: The politicians patting themselves on the back for repealing subsidies to farmers have found a surreptitious way to deposit these savings right back in the pocket of agribusiness. That’s because the farm bill will expand subsidies for crop insurance, which looks like a private-sector program but which actually hands over virtually the same amount of taxpayer money to farmers, mostly wealthy ones, as the old direct payment program. What’s more, the shift from direct payments to crop insurance ensures that those handouts can be distributed in a hidden, more politically palatable way, making it more difficult to ever dislodge them.

Direct payments were not traditionally tied to prices, and were distributed whether farmers planted crops or not. The new system, according to supporters, only delivers payouts if farmers take losses. But this is a bit misleading. Federally subsidized crop insurance programs pay almost two-thirds of a farmer’s premium, as well as most of the insurance claims, guaranteeing revenue regardless of crop failure or even price swings. The current farm bill expands the program to cost the government $90 billion over ten years, an increase of $7 billion. But that’s just an estimate, which may be low. Farmers received $16 billion in crop insurance payments alone during last year’s Midwest drought, most of it paid by the federal government. Despite the poor conditions, net agriculture income increased 15 percent last year, a tribute to the relative pointlessness of the subsidies.

Referring to beneficiaries as “farmers” underplays how giant agribusinesses really benefit from subsidized crop insurance. There have traditionally been no limits to premium support, meaning the richest businesses reap the most benefits. A provision from Sen. Tom Coburn to reduce payouts for farmers with over $750,000 in income was stripped from the final bill, despite passing the Senate twice. The Environmental Working Group, a critic of crop insurance, estimates that 10,000 policyholders receive over $100,000 a year in subsidies annually, with some receiving over $1 million, while the bottom 80 percent of farmers, the mom-and-pop operations, collect only $5,000 annually. These are educated guesses, because under current law, the names of individual businesses receiving support are kept secret, a provision maintained in the new farm bill. The House version included a measure that would disclose which members of Congress receive subsidies, but that was dropped.

Another beneficiary of crop insurance subsidies are the private insurance companies administering the program, which received $1.3 billion for administrative expenses in 2011. That’s despite the fact that a crop insurance program largely paid for by the government is extremely lucrative for these companies, with a 30 percent average return and $10 billion in profits over the past decade. The generosity of the program also leads insurers to cover outsized risk, with farmers planting in low-yield areas, knowing they will get rewarded either way.