The tale of two hands

Came upon this in the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ.com - After Storms, Florida Wakes Up
To a New Insurance Reality: "As Floridians begin picking up the pieces from the second devastating hurricane in less than a month, many are also discovering the full effects of a decade of maneuvering by insurance companies and state officials that has dramatically reduced the obligations of private insurers to pay for the impact of catastrophic storms."

Typical business, I thought. Selling themselves as caring and then trying to stiff their customers for as much as they can get away with. And the government, supposedly our stewards, letting them get away with it:

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Florida homeowners -- including many who have paid for what they believed was "full" property insurance -- now find themselves holding the bag for a much bigger portion of the estimated $10 billion to $15 billion in insured damage from Frances and Charley than they would have a decade ago.

Florida regulators and legislators allowed private insurance companies to add hefty new deductibles to homeowners' policies and to raise premium rates in some cases by as much as fourfold.

On the other hand:

What has happened in Florida is partly the result of a big shift in the way U.S. insurance companies have operated over the past decade. The industry has adopted increasingly sophisticated underwriting tools to avoid insuring higher-risk homes and has taken steps to lay more of the burden to pay claims on policyholders themselves. California residents who face the threat of storms or wildfires, for example, must choose between sometimes bare-bones coverage offered by insurance pools organized by the state and high-cost policies from niche insurers such as Lloyd's of London.

And it's hard to blame them. No one has a right to live cheaply in hurricane alley. Delicious lives in California, where we know a devastating earthquake is going to happen one of these days, and it's hard to see how that makes for good business for an insurance company.