Insurance is really a fantastic racket, right up until the point where your customers have to actually use your service. Paying claims is a bummer, as any insurer will tell you. Why can’t the customers just send us a check every month and never ask us to pay them back, they would say (off the record, of course). It was payouts that wrecked AIG – why, if everyone hadn’t expected the company to actually cover the CDSs it sold, the company would still be flying high today. The nerve!

And for most insurers, there isn’t much worse than a natural disaster. Thousands of claims coming in at the same time from the same geographic locale? It’s so awful, we the insured should really be less selfish in demanding insurance cover our losses. It would help the economy. Even El Niño is getting on board, helping keep those nasty Atlantic hurricanes at bay so the beleaguered insurers don’t have to pay their mean old coastal customers for new houses and TVs, or at least waste overhead on denying customer claims because they say it’s really flood damage so ha ha you no can haz TV or house to watch it in.