Road Home/Tax Payers Increase Insurance Industry Profits

A few quotations from an article by David Hammer in the T-P today:

Federal and state documents obtained by The Times-Picayune pin the largest chunk of a multibillion-dollar shortfall on hurricane wind damage that Road Home is paying because insurance companies did not.

An LRA report says lower-than-expected insurance payouts have caused the Road Home to pay $1.3 billion that the state thought private insurers would have handled. It finds that insurance companies covered an average of 61 percent of all inspected damage, rather than the 76 percent payout rate the state expected when it set the Road Home budget. The report also finds that 37 percent of a sample of 46,223 insured Road Home applicants collected private insurance on less than half of their damage. And 11 percent got less than 10 percent of their total damage paid by insurance.

Why pursue the lawsuit if the Road Home is just going to subtract the insurance off of it, especially when I have a limited tolerance for stress and can only deal with the most important crises of each day?" said Badger, 66, who is still waiting for her Road Home grant and says she feels as if the walls of her trailer are closing in on her every day.

And my favorite lie spin from the insurance industry:

"To suggest that insurers have not met their obligations or have been subsidized by the LRA is unfounded," said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute. "The LRA is . . . using insurers as their scapegoats. Insurers have met their obligations to their homeowners, paying out more than $40 billion in insurance, and that's a fact."

Hey Loretta, Allstate didn't meet their obligation to me and my family, and that's a fact.