> Hurricane Helene crashed into an insurance sector facing a series of potentially existential questions, and a policy landscape in which the United States has left key decisions about how communities prepare for and recover from disasters in the hands of companies that exist to turn a profit—not provide protection. “Right now, we’re essentially leaving all of these decisions about land use and where risk mitigation happens up to insurance companies,” says Moira Birss, a longtime organizer and fellow at the Climate & Community Institute.
Insurance companies are probably the entity best incentivized and infotmed to make decisions about where to build houses and what risk mitigation to do.
Insurance companies are best incentivized and informed to make themselves a requirement, take your money, and then resist all efforts to actually pay you when you need them.
Except they tend to use only publicly funded maps or pull out all together.
They're best informed not to take the risks.
And when government has tried to update flood maps, the citizens stop them because those maps level house prices to basically kill the value of homes and there's no socialist plan to ensure they move out. Instead nothing changes and insurance just either pulls out or waits for the end then stops covering.
It's mostly capitalism in action: bad choices to spend money into bad choices, because that raises the GDP via "rebuilding"
Insurance companies are probably the entity best incentivized and infotmed to make decisions about where to build houses and what risk mitigation to do.