Next up to the weasel table: Insurance Companies

[UPDATE: Janet tells me that from having lived in Louisiana, this isn't weasel behavior on the part of the insurance industry. Apparently when she has bought policies, she has been explicitly told that regardless of the original cause, if water damages your house that came in through windows or a roof that have been blown out/off by a hurricane, that's hurricane damage. If it comes up from the ground, that's flood damage. So while it feels weasel-ish, and while it's tragic that the areas least eligible (and least able to afford) flood insurance are also the once most likely to be under feet of water, it is apparently consistent and not the "bait and switch" maneuver I'd been led to believe. -- Liam]

Apparently the Insurance Companies that write Hurricane insurance policies are trying to classify the damage to New Orleans as caused by flooding, not by Hurricane Katrina, because far fewer people had flood insurance (much of the area not being eligible for it).

As Doug Heller from ConsumerWatch.org puts it, that's kind of like arguing that the murderer didn't kill anyone... the bullet did.

We've probably all experienced Insurance Industry weasel behavior before, but it takes real brass ones to tell a saddened nation that since the hurricane caused a flood, it doesn't count as hurricane damage.

(Then again, the gasoline companies got away with jacking our prices up by $1/gallon well before their costs could possibly have risen that much, why shouldn't the Insurance industry get in on the profiteering action?)

And speaking of the gas companies, why did Citgo prices go up? Citgo is the company owned by the Venezuelan oil interests. Their oil ALL comes from Venezuela. How, exactly, did their costs go up at all?

Liam.