Reply #16: I believe your anger at the beach dweller may well be misplaced.

[merh]

If she only got $80,000 from her insurance company, I would think that the problem lies with the insurance industries' stance that she wasn't entitled to the full payoff because her house was not destroyed by winds but by the storm surge.

As the insurance industry did after Katrina. They all got together and agreed to not pay off claims if storm surge was involved. Take my situation. My home was a small cottage built in 1948. It had survived past hurricanes like Camille and Betsy. Sure, it may have taken on water during Camille, but it wasn't totally destroyed, flattened by the winds and pushed into the street by the surge like what happened to it during Katrina.

I lived in my house since 1986, paying insurance the entire time, first renters and then homeowners when I finally had the chance to purchase. My mortgage company only required homeowners as my house was not in a flood zone though it was on the bay. It was on high ground above the flood zone. I paid higher insurance premiums because of its location and I was willing to do so because of my location.

When the insurance company finally sent an engineer out to survey my damage three months after my house was destroyed, he agreed that the total destruction was due to the winds or a tornado before the surge came. But, he cautioned, he was not the one that made the call. He would have to turn in his report and a second pair of eyes would have to inspect my damage. The second pair of eyes never showed but I did get a letter advising me my claim was denied because my house was destroyed by the surge.

Now mind you, in the interim I hired my own expert to review the weather data and my destruction. That expert determined that my house was battered by hurricane winds for over 8 hours before the surge came. The roof of my house had been blown off and was sitting in my yard. The house had been compromised and collapsed and when the surge came it pushed my debris and my roof into the street and into my across the street neighbor's yard.

Since I was not required to have flood insurance I never got it, I was assured I was not in a flood zone.

I had to sue my insurance company and that litigation lasted for years until I finally settled for a portion of what I was entitled to. You see I settled because I was beat down. I couldn't fight it any longer, it just wasn't in me.

While I was without a house, living in a fema trailer, I continued to pay the full premium on my house that did not exist. I didn't want to loose the insurance. Carriers had stopped writing along the coast. Once I finished building a new home, my premium was doubled and this year they tacked on a 15% surcharge for having to pay my claim. That is in addition to the flood insurance I had to buy.

And please remember, we had no jobs after the storm. First there was not utilities and the roadways were not passable and many of the businesses couldn't open until they went through extensive repair and/or were rebuilt entirely. Had the insurance companies paid the full amount of our claims and had they paid in a timely fashion, the need for grants would not have been so high and we would have rebuilt quicker.

Like most all of the problems we face in our society today, the problems are caused by the insurance companies. We need insurance reform. The labeling of the efforts to improve health care is not accurate. It is not health care reform that is being debated. It is health insurance reform that is being discussed.

Many employers have trouble hiring because of the high cost of required insurance. Their premiums are outrageous. I know one contractor that can't afford to bid on jobs because of the increase in the required insurance premiums.

Sorry for ranting on, but I have trouble with people who blame the homeowners as readily as you have. There is much more to things than the fact that she must be well off if she lives on the beach. Plenty of ordinary folks like me were fortunate to have nice views in our tiny homes and we paid our insurance premiums for years with very few, if any claims, being made.

The greedy insurance bastards made a 44 billion dollar profit in 2005 that grew to 60 billion in 2006, despite Katrina and Rita and Wilma. That should tell you something.

Let me edit here to add that we had to continue to pay the mortgage on the nonexisting homes. Sure, they offered us a 3 month grace period which ended up being a balloon note tacked on to the existing mortgage. And remember, we were unemployed, but we still had to pay our bills and meet our mortgages.