This editorial was originally published in the Orlando Sentinel on August 13, 2023 and can be found here.
Gov. Ron DeSantis was recently asked about Florida’s property insurance crisis, where insurance companies are forcing Floridians to pay higher and higher prices for home insurance – if they don’t just cancel their coverage entirely.
“Knock on wood we won’t have a big storm this summer,” DeSantis said.
Excuse me? That’s your plan?
Maybe to be extra safe, we should all look for a few genie lamps and try wishing for a stable insurance market, too.
I suppose it’s probably not surprising that the best Ron DeSantis can come up with is knocking on wood. This is a governor who has made it crystal clear that he would much rather spend his time trying to divide Floridians with fake culture wars rather than trying to solve the real cost-of-living challenges that impact all of us.
And the truth is, the last time Gov. DeSantis decided to do something about property insurance, he just made the situation worse. He signed a bill last December that made it even easier for insurance companies to raise rates – while also making it harder for Floridians to make these companies actually pay claims.
This was a giveaway to the insurance industry, pure and simple – and it hasn’t worked. One insurance company just hit a St. Augustine woman with a $36,000 bill. Meanwhile, Farmers Insurance announced that it is pulling out of Florida altogether.
Part of the problem is that too many people seem more focused on finding scapegoats than finding solutions. For instance, the governor and most of my colleagues in the Florida Legislature seem incapable of doing anything other than blaming trial lawyers and passing laws that make it harder for Floridians to access the courts.
But we don’t have time to keep pointing fingers. This is a complicated issue — and everyone must play a role in trying to fix it.
Look, there is no question that excessive lawsuits and litigation can drive up costs. But we’ve already passed plenty of reforms to address that.
But we also know that insurance companies have been using accounting tricks to pull enormous profits out of Florida in years where we have not had hurricanes – only to then claim insolvency when a big storm hits. We need to stop that from happening, too.
Florida has also provided $3 billion worth of bailouts to property insurers over the past two years. But we need to make sure those savings start getting passed on to Floridians — and not just pocketed by insurance executives.
And it is long past time that leaders in Tallahassee start getting serious about combating climate change — weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel, supporting more development of cleaner, renewable fuels and fostering the adoption of everything from rooftop solar panels to electric vehicles. Climate change is spurring stronger hurricanes, bigger storm surges and heavier rainfall — which are in turn driving up insurance prices.
We should also be making more use of Citizens Property Insurance, the state-run insurance company — the one insurance company whose prices aren’t inflated by profit margins and that we know won’t flee the state at the first sign of trouble.
Insurance lobbyists keep pushing changes that force more and more Floridians out of Citizens and into private insurance that both costs more and covers less. And they make disingenuous claims that having more people in Citizens puts the rest of us on the hook for a storm, even if it hits in another part of the state.
But the truth is that we’re all already paying for the cost of unreliable private insurance: All policyholders in Florida are currently paying 3.7% in assessments on their home or auto policies to cover the collapse of at least 10 insurance providers over the last few years.
The truth is that there aren’t any easy, pain-free fixes to a problem as complex as property insurance in a state that sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean at a time of climbing temperatures, rising seas and stronger hurricanes.
But I and my Democratic colleagues in the Florida Legislature have developed a series of thoughtful proposals to reform Florida’s insurance market — plans focused on providing direct relief to Floridians and holding all bad actors accountable.
I won’t pretend our plans are perfect.
But they’re a lot better than just knocking on wood.
Anna V. Eskamani represents District 42 in the Florida House.