If you buy a home with a mortgage, you need insurance on the house. Not on part of the house, but on the whole thing.

Yet you can put money in a bank and only have insurance on some of it—and if you’re wealthy, only a tiny portion of it. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) insures deposits up to $250,000, through premiums banks pay for the coverage. For most ordinary people, that’s plenty of insurance, since the average bank balance is around $42,000. But when Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, failed in early March, 94% of its deposits were above the insured amount, a glaring vulnerability that helped trigger a startling run on the bank and destabilized the regional banking sector.

Regulators and banking experts are now pondering whether it’s time to dramatically change the deposit-insurance system so that most or even all deposits in ordinary banks are covered by insurance. Federal regulators have already invoked emergency measures to cover all uninsured deposits at SVB and, implicitly, at any other bank that might fail. Some members of Congress are drafting legislation to formally change a deposit insurance system that still resembles the Depression-era stopgap that first went into effect in 1934.

“Coverage caps on federal deposit insurance have become not only anachronistic, but dangerous,” Robert Hockett of Cornell Law School writes in a new paper outlining how universal deposit insurance could work. “We have a much better solution in plain sight … remove all caps on federal deposit insurance, continue to risk-price its premia as required by law and afford FDIC the option of progressively pricing those premia as deposit amounts grow.”

Throughout the banking system, about 43% of all deposits are uninsured. If a bank fails, the government will cover 100% of deposits up to $250,000. In theory, deposits above that amount are supposed to be treated like assets managed in a takeover or liquidation, and sometimes redeemed at less than 100%. But that’s not what happened when SBV failed. The government covered all deposits, including the uninsured ones, because doing otherwise could have led to runs on uninsured deposits at hundreds of other banks and caused an immediate financial crisis.