The House of Representatives is scheduled this week, as early as today, to consider an extension and “reform” of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), administered by FEMA. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the NFIP has been about $18 billion in the hole. And this is from a program that only collects around $2 billion a year in premiums, which barely covers losses and expenses in a normal year. So make no mistake, the NFIP is still on course to cost the taxpayer billions more in the future.

Even before Katrina, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the NFIP was receiving a subsidy of close to a billion dollars a year. Under CBO’s optimistic projections, the House’s reform bill would increase NFIP revenues by about $4 billion over the next ten years, making only a small dent in the program’s current deficit.

The projected cost savings could potentially be lost by the expansion of the NFIP in the House bill. Yes, you read that correctly. Despite being deep in debt, the House is proposing to expand the coverage, and hence the risk, underwritten by the NFIP. For instance, the reform bill adds coverage for living expenses and “business interruption expenses,” as well as increasing the coverage limit from $350,000 (250k for structure and 100k for contents) to about $520,000 per home.

Such a massive expansion of coverage would likely drive out the existing providers of excess flood insurance coverage. And yes, you also read that correctly: there are a handful of insurers that offer private flood insurance. There is absolutely no reason that the private market could not offer flood insurance. Yes, rates might go up for the highest risk properties, but they would likely go down for others (and clearly reduce costs to the taxpayer). And given the high administrative costs of the NFIP (about 30 percent of premiums go directly to private insurance companies to help run it), it is likely that a completely private system of flood insurance would be cheaper.

In the aftermath of the housing bubble and its extreme costs to the taxpayer, we should eliminate the vast array of subsidies for housing construction, including the NFIP. If there’s one thing we should have learned, the underpricing of risk can have disastrous results.