The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Insurance Industry
Cameron Parish, Louisiana, used to be a nice collection of little coastal towns where the shrimping was good and the stars at night were better, James Hiatt told me. Hiatt lives just up the river, in Lake Charles, but he comes down to Cameron to be near the Gulf. He remembers when there were 1,500 people, a grocery store, and a Family Dollar in Cameron, the parish seat. But that was before the storms started smashing through every year or two, and back when more commercial-insurance companies still covered homes here.
Eddie Lejuine, a trout fisherman living one town away, in Hackberry, used to pay $5,800 a year to a private insurer to cover the home he and his wife have lived in for decades, which now sits on stilts set at 16 feet above the water. The company dropped them in June 2021, right in the middle of hurricane season, Lejuine told me. The only insurer who would pick up their policy was the state insurer of last resort, Louisiana Citizens.
