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As New Orleans residents begin to inch back into the waterlogged city they used to call home, attempting to find new ways to live their old lives, the companies that provide Americans with their insurance are attempting to extract every last dollar from them in a fashion similar to wringing a wet towel.

“We’ve been told there will be a 35 percent hike (in our premiums) next renewal,” said a Louisiana woman posting her anger on the democraticunderground.com forum. “I don’t know how we will afford this hike. ... I’m truly sick of this highway robbery.” This, of course, is an unfair metaphor – highway robbers don’t pretend like they’re providing you with some sort of service.

In the insurance industry’s case, however, reassuring insurance salesmen with briefcases who use important-sounding words such as “coverage” and “deductible” tell you how happy they are to provide you and your family with a little peace of mind as they’re scrawling, “We don’t cover floods or hail or when it’s real windy outside and the house blows down” in tiny letters in the margin of your policy.

This isn’t only important to people from New Orleans. Not only do private companies in California not cover earthquakes, forcing the state to shoulder the risk when it is already nearly bankrupt, but other forms of insurance, including the health insurance that every student is required to have, act on the same principle of “covering” you as little as possible.

It would seem, on its face, to be logical – there was $56.8 billion of disaster losses last year, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, double the previous record. Perhaps they’re simply scrambling for more money, like a student whose parental funds aren’t enough to cover an emergency expense.

“Unless insurers can get relief, you’re going to see a pullback by the private industry,” said Robert Hartwig, an economist for the industry-funded Insurance Information Institute, in the same article. “We’re not being good stewards of our investors’ capital ... if we keep doing business where we can’t make money.”

A business not making money! It’s an affront to our capitalistic sensibilities. It stings the entrepreneurial nostrils and it leaves a bitter taste on our tongues. Too bad it’s a load of hogwash.

Companies dealing with auto- and homeowners-insurance made a record $44.8 billion in profit last year, even including the record payouts to those with damaged homes, and raised its surplus more than 7 percent to almost half a trillion dollars, according to The Times. This profit is partly due to the fact that American insurance companies often have foreign insurance for their insurance (meaning that companies overseas actually pay for many of the claims) and that the big companies make plenty of profit in their other lines of insurance. And while premiums have increased by more than half since the early 90s, the amount of loss covered after Katrina has fallen from near 60 percent to around 30 percent.

But the insurance industry is still quaking in its wing-tips over potentially not making enough profit. “If last year’s hurricane season had occurred 10 years ago, it would have been devastating for the company,” said Allstate Vice President Fred Cripe. “Last year, it was merely disappointing.”

I’m sure we can all commiserate with Cripe that the most devastating disaster in American history was a little disappointing for Allstate, just like you might be disappointed about a friend getting hit by a bus because it means he can’t take notes for you in class anymore.

Having the temerity to call this year’s profits a “fluke,” as if a bunch of money fell like manna from the sky into State Farm’s employee parking lot, insurance companies are trying to shift more of the burden onto consumers by way of the aforementioned rate increases and by asking the government to take more responsibility for insuring citizens.

What is necessary is exactly the opposite. It may require Rep. Cynthia McKinney throwing a cell phone at the CEO of Geico, but the government must force companies to actually do the service that they’re supposed to do. Insurance is a different enterprise from normal sales-oriented companies; the service it provides is crucial yet often unaffordable, and thus cannot be treated as simple supply-and-demand. Tens of millions of Americans can’t afford health insurance, and New Orleans residents who can’t even afford to rebuild their homes will never be able to afford homeowners insurance rates that have doubled or tripled.

Insurance companies don’t even provide their overpriced service reliably. If you have an HMO or even UCLA’s student health insurance plan, do you feel confident that any affliction that might befall you would be covered? More likely you wonder if anything at all is covered. (“Ms. Jones, we know it says in your policy that broken bones are insured, but it clearly says in Appendix 3C, in scary-looking and unintelligible language, that we are not liable for broken bones induced in undergarment-jogging-leading-to-falling-into-a-fountain activity.”) Once you graduate and have to start paying all your different insurance premiums on your own with only an entry-level salary, the fact that costs are rising while profits are going up will look even worse.

It’s time for the government to introduce stricter standards of service for the insurance industry and strict regulations on how fast rates can rise relative to levels of profit. That may sound like unwarranted government intrusion into private enterprise, but students with health emergencies, recent graduates who need home insurance, and residents of New Orleans who need disaster insurance need to be covered more than Allstate needs more money piled in its surplus. We all need coverage, whether we ever think about it or not. We can only hope that our last reasonable means of getting it don’t get washed away in a flood of greed.

Atherton knows he got a little carried away with that last metaphor. E-mail him with better column endings at datherton@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.