Last year’s devastating hurricane season has increased interest in a bill to force coastal property owners to bear more of the cost of hurricane repairs.

Insurers like Allstate have also supported a bill in Congress to create a federal catastrophe fund to provide protection if cataclysmic losses extend beyond what both insurers and state government funds can provide. Introduced by two Florida representatives last November, the bill has yet to gain broad support. “But if we have anything close to the hurricane season we had last year, the momentum for it will grow,” says Robert Litan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has called for a catastrophic reinsurance fund that would make the government the insurer of last resort for huge disasters.

By routinely stepping in with disaster relief, he says, the government undermines some homeowners’ incentives to take adequate precautions. Instead, by collecting the necessary funds in advance, mostly through added insurance premiums for homeowners in high-risk areas, “you confront residential homeowners with the full cost of living where they do.”