Weathering the storm

NEW YORK

The headline numbers were eye-popping: Allstate reported a record $5 billion profit for 2006. State Farm Insurance’s profit climbed 65 percent for the year. St. Paul Travelers’ earnings rose sixfold in the fourth quarter, American International Group’s rose eightfold.

A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, profits at the nation’s major property-casualty insurance companies soared — and are expected to be strong again in 2007, according to estimates by the A.M. Best Co. rating agency.

Critics contend the insurers are doing well financially by shorting the people who bought their products — including hundreds of consumers who still haven’t received settlements for their Katrina claims. The industry, in turn, denies taking advantage of consumers, instead crediting its growing profitability to fewer storms last year and improved business procedures.

One of the harshest critics, J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance for the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America in Washington, D.C., accuses the nation’s insurers of using Katrina and other major hurricanes to try to justify “overpricing insurance, underpaying claims and reaping unjustified profits” at the expense of homeowners and business owners.

Mr. Hunter, a former Texas state insurance commissioner, added that he expects the industry to continue to do exceptionally well because it is pushing more risk and more cost onto policyholders.

“They’re making homeowners and business owners take on more of the risk through high deductibles, caps on replacement costs and other limitations,” he said. “And they’re refusing to renew tens of thousands of homeowner and business property policies, especially along the coasts.”

Mr. Hunter argues that state regulators “have not done the job to control excessive prices” charged by the insurers.

For consumers, the situation is both frustrating and financially burdensome.

Joyce Ridgeway, whose four-family house in the Esplanade Ridge neighborhood of New Orleans was damaged when Katrina hit in August 2005, is still waiting for a final settlement from British insurer Lloyd’s. So far, she has received $30,000 toward the $85,000 needed to cover living expenses and to repair the roof, gutters and wood siding wrecked by the storm.

Miss Ridgeway, a 52-year-old public health worker, is frustrated that she’s still living on the property in a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Tenants are back in just two of the units.

“I’ve been doing bits and pieces as I can to get repairs done,” she said. “I’ve waited so long. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Industry experts argue that the property-casualty insurers did amazingly well in handling Katrina — the most costly catastrophic event ever in the United States — and the other hurricanes in 2004 and 2005.

Robert Hartwig, president and chief economist with the New York-based Insurance Information Institute, points out that the industry has so far “paid $41 billion on 1.74 million claims for Katrina alone — and for the combined 2004-2005 hurricane season, we paid about $81 billion in insured hurricane-related losses.”

The industry’s profits rose in 2006 in part because there were far fewer storms, Mr. Hartwig said.

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