Insurance is failing hurricane survivors: ‘People thought they were covered’

Insurance companies have a conflict of interest inherent in their business model. They make money by taking your money up front and then paying you back as little as possible at a later date. Any way to weasel out of paying up, especially in a big event like a hurricane, is a huge money saver for them. And most people are desperate. Their house is gone. They aren't in a position where they can argue and sit on the phone for hours and work it out.

We need some kind of ACA for regular insurance, where unless people are literally building in a swamp or the bottom of a crater near a lake/river they should be just automatically covered.

Private insurance used to offer flood insurance like 100 years ago, but to stay in business they had to raise premiums to a point where no one could realistically afford it (which is to say that living in a flood zone is not financially feasible for most people). The government had to step in with their own flood insurance program, which was tied to regulation intending to minimize the risk of flooding in at-risk zones so that premiums could remain affordable. Even these measures haven't been sufficient to keep the program from running out of money, and we've been subsidizing it with taxpayer bailouts to keep it afloat.

All this is to say that private insurance is literally incapable of insuring against flood damage, so you can't blame them for any of this. If you want to blame someone, blame Trump for rolling back standards that would have allowed FEMA to consider climate change in their risk models.

Their entire business model is fucking people over.

That would require good governance, appropriate oversight, and consumer activism. Unfortunately Florida man has no interest in these things.

To be fair... They would have been happy to have sold these people food insurance. How many would have purchased it even if they knew more about it? How keen are you to listen to your insurance company trying to "upsell you shit you don't need?"

Asheville is in the mountains, one of the reasons it was such a big story is that no one expected Asheville to flood. I'm not surprised almost no one up there has flood insurance.

I would expect that it wouldn't be considered a flood zone if it took a hurricane to flood it.

Flood areas are defined as somewhere where there's a 1 in a 100 chance of a flood happening. The problem is all the calculations for that are based on historic data, which is to say they don't take into account climate change.

Water damage to your house is generally covered unless it's specifically excluded (flood). Plumbing leaks are usually covered, and the same goes for wind driven rain.

When it comes to your belongings, coverage is the opposite, meaning nothing is covered unless the policy specifically says it is. Plumbing water damage is covered, but wind driven rain is only covered if an opening is created by the wind or hail. This could be as minor as a missing shingle.

Flood damage (the rising water kind) isn't covered by homeowners insurance for the building or your belongings, but renters policies do typically cover flood damage.

Some people own their homes and don't have mortgages.

Yea it's full coverage the way heath insurance is full coverage, eyes, teeth and mental health are not included. It's fucked up

Another thing to know about ahead of time is replacement cost coverage. I knew something that only had cash value coverage for their roof in addition to an $8000 deductible. They got a check from the insurance for about $200 and had to pay the rest out of pocket.

Nah, in this case I blame the government for not having clearer regulations and a lack of informational programs.

Maybe all insurance should cover floods - but if we wanted that we'd need to regulate it... these policies were sold without flood insurance and it's quite likely the sellers tried to aggressively upsell them to also get flood insurance.

Maybe the insurance should be government run but we need insurance - health insurance is a scam because it's a fucking fake market, but housing insurance has a healthy market and insurers that reneg on their contract get taken to court and pursued by some truly asshole lawyers... you might argue that falsely denying a claim should come with higher penalties (and I'd agree) but half our government thinks regulations are the fucking devil.

Insurance is an inherently good idea - if we shuffled things up so that none of these people had any insurance then we'd have foreclosures and homelessness across the south right now - insurance companies are dicks but insurance is a good thing to have.

That's so weird because my house is literally on a lake and I didn't have to get flood insurance. I had to look up all of the flood maps and saw that the chance of flooding is once every 1000 years.

NOAA (I think) updated flood predictions and the flood line moved slightly toward my house. Still no flood insurance required.

Mine and flooded twice in the last 4 years. Last time I got a sump pump out in, both time insurance would not help and I can't get flood insurance as I'm not in a flood zone. FEMA helped me out both times though.

Note that a lot of the people that are in trouble this time are hundreds of miles inland in mountains.. .

I understand the sentiment, but that's too many people without flood insurance for it to be called "their own stupidity". 20% of the population can be stupid. Maybe 50%. But 99.1%? Nah, they got scammed

The only shitty thing is just how expensive absolutely everything has been. People selling their houses because insurance is so astronomically expensive that they can no longer afford to insure it. Of course this whole increase in extreme weather conditions is due to climate change, because we suck, and the planet was going to go through this eventually anyway, but it is mostly because we suck.

On the point of people not knowing they need flood insurance, you are right. Definitely callous, but this has been the norm for decades. The system is unfair, but insurance companies exist to make money, not help you. I don't understand how they wouldn't know this by now, that you need both. Especially in Florida. I remember even after Katrina it was talked about on the news for weeks about this practice.