It’s called flood insurance, but the village of Lake Delton is about to prove that the National Flood Insurance Program is anything but an insurance product.

Lake Delton made the national newscasts in June when over 10 inches of rain hammered the village. It rained so hard and so long that houses were sucked into the lake, which washed out a chunk of county highway and created a new channel into the Wisconsin River. It left the lake a muddy bowl that won’t be refilled until next spring at the earliest.

It appeared that the disaster was compounded by the village’s decision to let its participation in the flood insurance program lapse. But don’t worry, village residents with losses will be covered. The village approved a new flood plain map, which is the first step toward qualifying village residents for retroactive benefits.

Sound policy? Perhaps, but it definitely can’t be described as insurance. Imagine an automobile driver wrecking his or her car and then buying auto insurance after the fact. Ordinarily people who don’t have insurance at the time of loss don’t get covered (see health insurance, pre-existing conditions), but the rules are apparently different for those who lose their houses in floods.

The disaster relief that’s coming to Lake Delton strikes another blow against free market fundamentalism and raises questions about how many of us really favor a genuine free market in which the government is completely agnostic about an individual’s economic circumstance. The private sector wants absolutely nothing to do with flood insurance, and the program is heavily subsidized by the federal government because that’s the only way in which flood coverage could possibly exist.

In the case of Lake Delton, of course, the program bears little resemblance to conventional insurance coverage; a village can let its participation lapse and still qualify for relief. Call it tax-and-spend, or call it the responsibility of a compassionate federal government. Just don’t call it insurance.