Worth understanding this whole argument applies only to local Florida-only insurers; the big national entities don't operate like this and also found Florida too expensive to operate in prior to the 2023 tort/insurance reforms.
> So executives create sister companies that charge the insurance company for basic services, such as claims handling, underwriting, accounting and issuing policies. (Large national insurers typically handle all of those services internally.)
This practice is pretty common in auto insurance. The company you wrote your policy with is usually broker and your ID car will list the actual Insurance Company. If you go through an independent agent you'll encounter 3 layers of abstraction where the agent writes business for multiple brokers who manage books of business for different insurance companies.
I think the elephant in the room is fraudulent claims. Majority of the claims filed is related to over-priced contractors. Pick any city, pick any house - old, new, big, small, tiny - the average roof replacement is 4x-5x the cost!
I know of multiple cases where the adjusters send in claims that are 50% to 90% of the actual repair cost. This is the REAL problem. Not hurricanes. It’s the fucking fraud.
I think the only option to combat this is to give home owners the right to fix things like roof themselves…why do I need a city permit, why do I need a fraudulent contractor permitted ONLY by the city (I don’t want the city looking out for me…that’s always their BS argument…leave that to me). I should be able to shop the supplies myself.
Here’s another exercise - pick any city in FL - try to buy roofing materials yourself.
The point is - Fraud is the biggest problem with homeowners insurance in the state of FL.
Florida significantly reformed insurance/claims in 2023 to reduce fraud. Senate bill 2A prevents assigning insurance claim benefits to 3rd parties, which was a significant source of insurance fraud.
That seems impossible. I have been assured that only government pays fraudulent claims. The invisible hand ensures that corporations will root out fraud.
The elephant in the room is that hurricane insurance shouldn’t be a for profit business because no business can survive multiple cities being destroyed by a hurricane, this money should have been driven to a state fund that pays out when disaster strikes and the private insurance business should insure only the usual stuff.
Public home insurance with unlimited risk appetite would create a hazard as too many people would move and build carelessly. For public health and financial reasons, the state of Florida shouldn’t encourage this.
Reinsurance already covers excess claims before an insurer exits the market. There is no systemic risk from an insurance confidence crisis as there was in banking pre-FDIC.
Any suggestion to compensate with additional burden on homeowners (“just charge them more”, “require stricter building codes”) can be handled by existing insurance regulation.
Oh yeah, because the "collect hurricane insurance, spend all the money, go bankrupt" pipeline has worked wonders in Florida.
The government already foots the bill when insurance doesn't cover the costs (which is every single time here in Florida) and when there is no insurer anymore Citizens Insurance (the government plan) also covers it.
Homeowners insurance wasn't made for natural disasters and the fact we continue to make it so only fills the purses of the fraudsters running the scams. The moment there is no more free money for these insurers in Florida the market will change overnight.
democracies generally will not be able to insure at a sufficient level. i'm opposed to having the government force me to subsidize others poor choice of environ. if someone wants to live in a fire-prone or hurricane-prone area, that is their choice and they should be exposed to the true cost of insuring themselves and hopefully this will cause people to move somewhere safer instead or make changes (like a sturdier home, clearing brush, etc.) that reduce their rates.
It's not an elephant in the room. The fact that half of the populace is too brainwashed and/or stupid to understand truths like this is the elephant in the room.
> why do I need a city permit, why do I need a fraudulent contractor permitted ONLY by the city (I don’t want the city looking out for me…that’s always their BS argument…leave that to me). I should be able to shop the supplies myself.
You are not the only person that will own the house you live in, that’s essentially what permits and regulations are for, to ensure the next owner isn’t saddled with a stupid decision made by the previous homeowner. Roof inspections are particularly important in places with snow load or hurricane force winds.
Roof claims are prorated, if your previous roof was rated for 30 years and installed 15 years ago, you get half of the replacement cost paid.
If you don’t like it you can pay off your house and self-insure your residence. If you don’t like cities, go buy land and build a house in an unincorporated area, there are places that completely lack any local building code enforcement.
You are not the only person that will own the house you live in, that’s essentially what permits and regulations are for, to ensure the next owner isn’t saddled with a stupid decision made by the previous homeowner. Roof inspections are particularly important in places with snow load or hurricane force winds.
That’s what home inspectors are for at the time of purchase. And even if I choose to replace the roof myself - the city is free to inspect according to their ordinances. What I disagree with is that you MUST use their approved contractors.
And the prorated nonsense is simply mathematical fraud.
> What I disagree with is that you MUST use their approved contractors.
Who is ‘they’, the city or the insurer? The state I live in does not have approved contractors by jurisdiction, if you have a state license and any city specific licensing, you can pull a permit in that jurisdiction. Perhaps Florida is different.
If the contractors are mandated by the insurer, the fault lies with state law. In my state, insurers must use OEM replacement parts for car insurance repairs if the customer wants them to, this is due to state law. Likewise, my car insurer has recommended repair facilities, but state law forces them to allow me to choose where I have my car repaired under an insurance claim.
It’s understandable why the insurer wants only approved contractors (helps control costs), but your state could force the insurer to allow any contractor to do a repair covered by insurance by passing legislation. Insurance rules are almost entirely state specific, so blame your state government if you’re unhappy with the terms of your insurance policies.
> The state I live in does not have approved contractors by jurisdiction, if you have a state license and any city specific licensing
Unless I'm having a stroke, aren't counties/cities specific jurisdictions within a state?
Licensing IS a set of approved contractors, and we would be lying to each other if we pretended that state licensing requirements are always entirely aboveboard. Where I live, the city is notorious for being captured by local unions and setting (ludicrously high) minimum wages for tradesmen to guarantee they remain competitive.
Not sure I agree with the article.
1) Making a loss doesn't prevent you from paying a dividend. Dividends aren't paid from the current year's profit, but from retained earnings, i.e. from accumulated profits since the creation of the company. It is frequent for companies to maintain their dividend policy through cycles.
2) The insurer doesn't have to make a loss overall to make a claim that the rates charged on some specific part of their portfolio do not cover expected losses on that portfolio, since circumstances have changed. In theory insurance rates must be sufficient to cover expected losses, and I am pretty sure financial regulations require insurers to do so (prudential rules/solvency, though I do not work for an insurance company so not an expert).
So it is one thing to call the insurers claims bullshit, and maybe it is. But 1) they paid a dividend or 2) the company did not make a loss for the year, aren't valid arguments.
> Regulators asked for that [better metrics] in 2023 but lawmakers rejected it, claiming it would “upset the apple cart” of Florida’s insurance industry.
I don't disagree with the lawmaker's stance on this one. FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change. Why would I want to run an insurance operation in FL without an actual incentive (read: more money)? There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this?
You raise the rates on everyone to cover actual expected losses, and make sure that the insurance companies don't commit fraud.
Then people will say that they can't afford Florida. And they will be correct.
Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then?
It's rhetorical, since we see in this post's article what happens. But my point is that something like this was more-or-less inevitable.
[1]: https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan...
[2]: https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-he...
They want the socialism benefits wrapped in populist authoritarianism to appease their tribal and in group belief system. “The only moral benefits are my benefits.”
With Florida climate risk accelerating, the new admin telling states FEMA is unnecessary, and ~15-20% of Florida homeowners going without property insurance due to cost, this will manifest in an unfortunate but entirely expected outcome: catastrophic economic loss at some point in the future with no recourse for the majority impacted (citizen homeowners and GSE investors alike).
Followed by a federal bailout, presumably
> Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then?
Eventually, property values would be drastically reduced and home insurance would be more per year than the mortgage. If it’s 80% mortgage 20% insurance premiums now, maybe it will flip to something like 35%/65% mortgage/insurance with property values halved (or more). I’m ignoring the fact that the replacement cost of a home has little to do with the property value since most of that value is in the land, but the land would also be worth less. Regardless, a shitload of mortgages would be underwater, impacting both lenders and borrowers on a massive scale. Vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed.
Or, property values remain the same and the poor have to leave Florida. This assumes there are enough people that can move to Florida and pay the same for a property with doubled or tripled insurance premiums, which is probably less likely than the first scenario I laid out.
It's a little odd to say "vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed" without noting that this is the result of spending, borrowing and lending irrationally.
It's not so much that the mortgages are underwater. It's that the houses are.
Wouldn't the insurance being twice the mortgage mean that in the time you pay your mortgage the house is expected to be destroyed and rebuilt twice?
>> What happens then?
Same thing that's happening in CA. Insurers pull out of the state and non-renew policies.
I'm sure it was satisfying to see the regulator stick it to the insurance companies, but you can't force them to write policies if they don't think it's worth it.
This is literally the opposite of what is happening. They are reforming laws to decrease costs, and have had new insurers enter the market.
https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-f...
> FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change.
I was a South FL resident for half of my life. Either the insurance pool is spread across the entire country, subsidizing FL, or just stop.
FL will soon be uninsurable in the free market.
Only parts are uninsurable. If a house was built after 2005, it was done with updated hurricane codes. Most are built up higher, have hip roofs, and have their roofs strapped down to cinderblock walls with cement filled in the corners. All new roofs have a "sealed deck". The uninsurable are going to be on the coast (although you can mitigate this in a lot of cases) and low areas.
Side note: all insurance claims are subsidization.
Isn't this what happened in areas of California?
If I understand the situation correctly, yes.
The core of insurance is Lloyd's of London. They do the math, aka the re-insurance numbers.
If a retail insurance company can't get re-insurance for a local market, then they exit that local market.
That is what happened prior to the LA fires. The math saw it coming, re-insurance was pulled.
Both CA and FL are high-risk, and each have state-backed insurance systems of last resort. The more that these get tapped, the more unsustainable it all becomes.
Climate change, anthropogenic "or otherwise," sucks for insurance.
You're missing one key piece of the puzzle: consumer insurance rates in California are regulated by the California Department of Insurance led by an elected Insurance Commissioner. It's the agency responsible for regulating rates and how fast insurers can raise them. In the last decade, it's been very slow to allow insurers to raise those rates to account for the risk they've recalculated.
Insurers didn't pull out because the state is uninsurable, but because they were being hamstrung. Properly priced in fire insurance can be expensive here depending on location but it's not like Florida where there's predictable water damage to most houses in the path of a hurricane every 5-10 years. These past fires were the most destructive in history and burned under twenty thousand structures in the fifth largest economy in the world - it was traumatic but relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and well within the state's capacity to bail out without federal assistance (unlike Florida and the National Flood Insurance program which has sucked up tens of billions of federal funds since Katrina).
> There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this?
Are there?
As far as I can tell, hurricanes:
- Destroy buildings that are not properly designed and built to withstand enough wind. The industry and modern codes know how to deal with this for new and sufficiently retrofitted construction. I don’t even think the measures needed are particularly expensive.
- Damage to structures due to wind-blown rain. The more informed architects and engineers know how to deal with this. A very brief search suggests that even the Miami-Dade code hasn’t caught up: for example, you can still build a vented roof assembly in Florida. This is a poor idea in a humid climate even without hurricane, and those vents are problematic in a hurricane. Getting rid of them in new or remodeled construction is easy and not very expensive, but architects and builders need to learn how.
- Damage to structures due to flying things near them. In a city setting, this can be mitigated by building structures that don’t turn into flying junk and enforcing requirements for people to keep their yards clean.
- Flooding: this will cause massive damage to whole cities.
An interesting property of the issues other than flooding is that the most vulnerable structures may get destroyed by hurricanes, leaving behind the less vulnerable structures.
This is accurate at the macro level, but on the micro level the insurance companies are doing nasty insurance company stuff like doubling rates in ~5 years, requiring people to replace their roofs every 10 years instead of every 30 years (at their own expense) and low balling claims expecting most people to not hire a lawyer to fight for them when their house is in shambles. They've really gotten shady over the last few years. These aren't fly-by-night insurance companies, these are companies you've all heard of that make hundreds of billions of dollars a year, companies with blue logos and red logos; how American.
The other problem is, as most of you may know, to get a home loan to buy a house, you are required by the banks to carry insurance. This makes it a near monopoly that these companies are taking full advantage of. I'm sure the legislature is happy to take campaign contributions from these companies to ensure the status quo. No one will get arrested. You know the drill.
I agree insurance will be more expensive in a hurricane prone area, but all the shady stuff is what people are complaining about.
As a state, they consistently vote for politicians who are anti-regulation and pro-capitalism. What do they expect to happen here?
No one shoots themselves in the foot more often than GOP voters.
It’s wild to watch folks like my SIL (a teacher) and my BIL (a combat veteran with no other marketable skills) vote against their own self interests every time they select a GOP candidate.
These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.
> These folks have spent decades doing everything they can to make life more difficult for teachers and veterans. Yet teachers and veterans will still line up to elect these people.
I don't know your SIL or BIL, but in general they line up to vote because the party promises to make life even more difficult for people unlike them. "I may be losing my job and health benefits, but on the bright side, some immigrant might be sent back to their country, or some blue haired lesbian might be driven to suicide!" That's the mentality we're dealing with.
Agreed. They vote like that because they wish to make life more difficult for those they dislike.
See, the problem with two political parties is you get a lot of baggage for a couple of things you like. So you're basically voting for two piles of shit that may say one or two things you like. Did I like lockdowns? No, Do I like corrupt insurance, also no.
The way I see it is the Democrats are for the really poor people and the really rich people, of which I'm neither. The GOP is for the really rich people, of which I am not. Neither party has any interesting restoring any type of freedoms, they both want to ban stuff they don't like.
The middle class really has no real representation, and that's why we're dying.
they both want to ban stuff they don't like.
genuinely curious which stuff do democrats want to ban?
I’m curious to hear the answer as well.
Maybe they’ll say something about guns. But we all know Republicans basically invented modern gun control.
Democrats want to ban things like unvaxxed children. Which sounds like a great idea. Especially looking at the current measles outbreak in Texas.
In the last 4 years the Democrats expanded overtime eligibility, ramped up antitrust enforcement, got inflation under control, cracked down on junk fees, forgave billions in student loan debt, invested in domestic manufacturing, invested in infrastructure spending (unlike Trump's "infrastructure week" that was talked about for his entire term and never happened), prosecuted companies for union busting, added penalties for airlines who abuse customers, and so many other things.
Anyone who claims "both are the same" and "neither does not anything for the middle class" is being willfully ignorant.
Yea, you're right. Biden did some pretty good things for the middle class. I'm glad he got us out of Afghanistan finally, though it was pretty messy.
I'm more remembering Clinton's NAFTA and basically telling everyone to "learn to code," and Obama bailing out the banks but allowing middle class homes to be sold for pennies on the dollar to companies like Berkshire. It wasn't his mess, but the bailouts seemed one sided.
Biden also did some bad things, like the lockdowns, and threatening people's jobs if they didn't get the jab. Misrepresenting the efficacy of the vaccine, etc. I believe Pfizer made record profits off those policies, which was, for lack of a better word, "icky." The Twitter Files were pretty bad as well. I didn't like that he defended his 93 crime bill, one of our countries biggest mistakes. He also punted on legalizing pot, ensuring more of the drug war. That's kinda my point, with either party, we get a few good things and a lot of bad things. It always feels like a bad deal.
Lockdowns were under Trump. How quickly we forget ...
I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue.
To be fair, a lot of Democratic politicians destroyed their economies with extended lockdowns, and also being extremely generous with prosecuting theft, among other things, so Florida isn't the only one with bad choices.
I'm not defending DeSantis, but it seems the job of US politician attracts a certain type of person, regardless of what color their flag is. The longer they stay in, the more comfortable they get with being, lets say, morally flexible.
> I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue.
The was from DeSantis's first election for governor. The Democrat was Andrew Gillum, mayor of Tallahasee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Gillum
And it was meth, not crack, with a male hooker. But that was after he had already lost the election.
What's crazier is how close that election was. The spread was 0.4%. That's ~30K votes out of 8+M.
The 2022 reelection spread with DeSantis arguably at the peak of his popularity was 19.4% which is a landslide by all measures.
Well, then it sounds like they got what they wanted. If the numbers are to be believed, they got what they really wanted.
Which is why the rest of the nation is happy for them! They have the government they want and deserve. And I'm sure that government will sort out their problems in a fashion consistent with that government's beliefs, and therefore, also consistent with the desires of the people of Florida.
So everyone is getting what they wanted here. Really there is no problem.
You've heard of Elon talk of 'the woke mind virus'? Whether or not it's a thing, there is a concept of memetic viruses like computer viruses. There's also 'psy-ops', but psy-ops are usually intentional and pushed by some group, whereas mind viruses arise unintentionally. A few others:
Anti-Vaccine, Flat Earth, Doomscrolling, Productivity etc.
Well there's another. It captures people in their late 20s and 30s. It's getting political. It's getting far to ensconced in politics. You should treat politics like you are work at HF and your job is to find base reality truth. If not you become well, one of those guys, and unless you work in Government - no one wants to hear it.
California (largest state) burning is not good. Florida (3rd largest state) having rising house costs is not good. Don't get captured by tribalism.
Let's move past candidates. If we were to take a random polling of people in a median area of FL and ask them questions like "should we remove regulations on private businesses?". I would be flabbergasted if the polls showed anything other than overwhelming support for this. Likewise, I would imagine the same for a question like "Should the federal government provide home owners insurance".
And yet, if you were to ask the same people: "if you lost everything you owned in a disaster and were left penniless, should the government help you out?" I guarantee you the answer would be different.
And herein lies the real problem.
Wasn’t his last opponent Charlie Crist in 2022? He didn’t seem to be a bad choice.
Yes, you're right. Crist was a Republican governor before but he switched to Democrat last cycle. He was decent as far as I remember, but I was too young when he was governor and wasn't paying much attention. I wanted Crist to win last cycle; DeStantis really went off the handle starting with his second term. His first term was ok.
> the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker.
And yet Matt Gaetz got elected there. It seems having a flawed personal life isn’t a dealbreaker in Florida.
Gaetz was in the house. He only needed to convince his district to vote for him (1/28).
For some background, Florida is an incredibly challenging insurance market. In 2020, the state accounted for 85% of insurance litigation despite making up only about 10% of total premiums in the US. That combined with sky rocketing reinsurance costs, has driven tons of reputable carriers out of the state. They dodged a bullet with Milton - many of the remaining carriers are one big hurricane away from insolvency.
~20 years ago when I worked for an auto insurance broker, we opened a program in Florida and it was very challenging. I'm trying to remember the specifics but the regulations were such that you couldn't collect more than like 15 days of premium in the down payment and you were required to cover that policy for the first 30 days. So there was always something like a 15 day gap. This meant policies were cancelling after the first month and rewriting. They didn't have electronic approvals at this time so you couldn't implement any sort of real-time checks either. If your producer wrote a policy, you were on the hook for it. I think we introduced some by-fax validation process to mitigate this.
Another common practice for people who need insurance to register vehicle but had no intention of carrying insurance was to write bad checks. If the person was approved they'd basically have 30 days of coverage for free. If they had an accident they could pay the premium, if they didn't then they could let the policy lapse.
There was also something weird about the uninsured and underinsured coverage, I can't remember specifics but I think it was that the coverage was required due to the high number of people who drove uninsured but we couldn't charge for it? I can't recall exactly.
The regulations were such that it made it very hard to make money and I think we backed out of the market after 12-18 months.
Uninsured/underinsured is not required in Florida. It's good to have because it's the only coverage that actually benefits the insured - but it's not required. And it's not cheap.
The logical outcome of shareholder driven economy. Reminds me of a youtube quote: "Sell the houses to whom, Ben? Aquaman?"
Not surprising in the slightest. Let's hope the legislature delivers the recommendation that the office is asking for, hopefully this'll help slow the raise in insurance rates and get people off of Citizens.
Florida Insurers were running a Ponzi scheme, got it.
again, government at fault. it is beyond stupid that GSE mortgage backstops even exist in the first place
Sounds exactly like fraud.
I wonder how those rates of return compare to say Georgia and Wyoming.
(A state you'd expect to have reasonably similar risk and one where you'd not necessarily expect it to be similar)
Average elevation in Georgia: 600ft
Average elevation in Florida: 100ft
Georgia coastline: 100 mi non-NOAA
Florida coastline: 1350 mi non-NOAA
Even when cheating with non-NOAA numbers, Georgia is nowhere near comparable to Florida. Most of the people in your pools in Georgia are not on the coasts, and live at non-dangerous elevations. Whereas in Florida, nearly all of the people in your pools live on the coasts, and at extremely dangerous elevations.
For anyone else momentarily confused like me:
risk pools (which is evidently a term of art in insurance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_pool)
Not swimming pools, which was my first read of above comment, at which point I thought, "well obviously I got something wrong there, time to look at Wikipedia"
Sorry.
I should have been more clear.
Yes. Risk pools.
What I was trying to illustrate is that the fundamental model of sharing risk can work in a place like Georgia, whereas in a place like Florida it doesn't.
Okay, pick whatever state, but the interesting thing is looking at the rate the industry is pulling out profits at. Are the Florida affiliates 10 times more profitable or 100? And so on.
What's interesting is the entire thing is a game. I live in Florida. Had a roofer come by a couple years ago saying that a storm had come through a few months ago and there had been hail. So if he goes up on my roof and is able to find proof of hail damage I get a new roof for free. I needed a new roof at the time so while I generally look poorly on solicitation, I told him go ahead. A month later I had a brand new roof that cost me $1,000 out of pocket instead of $25,000.
These guys must have done 10 roofs within a few streets of my house.
So while the 250k is not a lot for an insurance company to eat, I am sure when that is multiplied by 1000's over the state, it gets expensive.
With that said, I also had a flood (10 inches of standing water) during a storm and my flood insurance company denied my claim because my sunken living room was considered a basement (2 steps down from the main floor). Turned into an indoor pool. So that was a nice $50k I had to spend out of pocket. I even paid separately for flood insurance as my hoi does not cover flooding. So total waste of money on that.
The entire thing is a circle of people scamming each other.
The roof stuff drives up prices massively. The MGA stuff is just the tool/response for the insurer to manage the downside for things like the roof nonsense - if they can pocket the fee when they write the deal then if there’s a subsequent rush of claims (some roofer, in some area, following some storm, which inflates claim costs), then the loss is capped at the equity they have in the insurance carrier.
My thoughts exactly. I live in Florida, and have for 30 years. I’ve never personally used my insurance, and my parents had to use theirs once when the neighbor’s tree randomly fell in our yard, and they also had their insurance pay for most of their roof-a lot of people do. I paid for my own roof fully out of pocket.
If you are near water or below ground then there is a near certain risk of flood, and I realize I subsidize those areas while I chose to stay away from water. But the entire national conversation is focused on saying that climate change has doomed Florida
Your insurance company blindly cut a check and didn't send an adjuster out to see how old your roof was and deny the claim or pro-rate it to only pay 10% of the cost?
Between tariffs (nails) and a huge number of undocumented workers in the roofing industry[1], it’s all setup to fall apart pretty soon.
[1] https://www.roofingcontractor.com/articles/100311-reporting-...
For those of us who live here, it's frustrating. Tons of scams and bullshit.
But we can name 10 recent transplants who built new, very large homes at water level in the past 5 years (ever wonder why they tell you hurricanes are getting more expensive??)
Then these same transplants scream bloody murder if the water gets close to their house. It has dominated political discussion in areas where, imho, these homes shouldn't even exist and other, less wealthy residents are lacking proper infrastructure maintenance.
Many of those transplants lost their shit after the recent hurricanes, even though anyone who is native knows it's always a possibility when you live 25 feet from the water at water level.
Then these same transplants want the cities to work impossible magic and "fix it." These same city officials, from my experience, are almost certainly in the pocket of big real estate investors.
Anyway, I get it. It sucks to flood out. But many of of these rich transplants clearly do not have the SLIGHTEST idea how the physics of water works. They're lucky it recedes so fast in my metro too.
Well, this probably explains why those Koi pond entranceways fell out of fashion after the 80s
Companies and their executives need to be held accountable of this will never stop.
No more bail outs and implement clawbacks.
What the insurers are doing is all legal, what do you propose exactly?
Do you think that the current administration is going to 'hold executives accountable'?
Trump could literally drive over to your house and shoot you in the head for even suggesting such a thing.
BUT BUT BUT Floridians voted for DeSantis, so its all good.
So now he's busy protecting insurers from being sued.
So nothing to see here. Just the government that you voted for collecting their bribes and protecting their friends.
Floridians are gonna get exactly what they deserve from the new administration.
DeSantis received 4.61 million votes [1] from a population of 23.37 million [2]. 3.15 million voters voted for a candidate other than DeSantis [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_history_of_Ron_DeSan...
14.5m eligible voters[0] - but your point still stands there. Though I'm of the opinion that non-voters implicitly voted for whoever won. So 11.35m hypothetical people voted for DeSantis in my mind.
[0]: https://dos.fl.gov/elections/data-statistics/voter-registrat...
The maxim of the law is "Silence gives consent." Those who did not vote voted for the winner.
And that's how democracy works. If you didn't vote? Well, your fault.
The beauty of the election is that it means right now in Florida you have exactly the government you want and deserve.
PS: Not voting is voting.
No real American has the right to sit on the sidelines anymore.
Sorry but a 4.5% profit cap in a state like Florida is ridiculously low. The problems with insurance are usually state-caused.
But of course - I don't understand why people are forgetting that when companies raise prices/cut benefits, it is not because of actual losses but because they want to return more of their revenue to shareholders than to customers or employees.
It is a flawed model that is sucking society dry but this is how America is set up. There are only a few ways to beat them - some of them involves lawmakers passing laws that protect people over investors. Ain't happening with the current elected officials.
It's all predicated on having competition, which of course companies hate. Once a company becomes both a monopoly and "too big to fail" it isn't really a company anymore, but functionally a piece of government run by unelected profiteers. If elected officials did their jobs and maintained something resembling a free market everything would be so much better.
I'm confused at the "free market" implication here. What resembles the free market has been deciding "Florida isn't worth it" and companies have been pulling out in response.
I'll concede in that a few bad regulations have accelerated this trend but these regulations, even if repealed, can't change the fact that tropical weather is becoming more severe.
After all, there are many other states that have a lot lower likelihood of town/city-level destruction in a year.
> If elected officials did their jobs and maintained something resembling a free market everything would be so much better.
Not happening for the next 4 years.
Absent government help, people need to take matters in their own hands. Build unions and co-ops. Customer unions, patient unions, homeowners unions - not just employer unions.
Band together and buy reduced price/better termed insurance.
Ultimately, shareholders must take a few years of losses - that's just business.
> But of course - I don't understand why people are forgetting that when companies raise prices/cut benefits, it is not because of actual losses but because they want to return more of their revenue to shareholders than to customers or employees.
When I raise my prices (construction services), it’s due to the annual wage increase for the union labor I use to perform the work. If I arbitrarily raise my price, I will lose a competitively bid project to a hungrier competitor.
I understand that not all industries are competitive, but that’s what regulations should be used for, regulating markets with a handful of players. Not all price increases are due to greed, the price of everything goes up over time due to inflation.
"It is a flawed model that is sucking society dry but this is how America is set up."
This article is about a problem of how Florida, specifically, is set up.
To the downvoter - perhaps you didn't read the article, don't know about Florida's P&C regulatory problems, or wanted to make another point. But from the article:
"The Office of Insurance Regulation said in a statement that the study was not given to lawmakers because it was “not a formal examination report.” It was produced months before lawmakers met in emergency legislative sessions in 2022 and left in a “draft” status."
Florida knew this, and was surpressing this, because the state executive branch is corrupt and in a state of regulatory capture.
Yes, and that’s why it’s relevant: Florida has a major problem which can’t be solved by pretending really hard that it doesn’t exist, and the legislative climate won’t allow actual fixes. Republicans have ensured that climate change is hitting everyone as hard as possible, and blocked corporate accountability or regulation, and prevented raising taxes to have the government step in, and neither party is willing to acknowledge the negative consequences of having home equity be the primary retirement fund for most people. There’s no way to make the current model work and the alternatives are blocked.
Agreed. It's trivially easy to manipulate suggestible people and say "this is why the system doesn't work" instead of really understanding something complex.
The system works. It is broken in Florida, but Florida broke it and has corruptly and incompetently swept the problem under the rug for a couple of decades while luring people with unsustainably low taxes and insurance premiums. That is beginning to unravel in a way that cannot be hidden.
I don’t think we can say the system really works as much as it’s failing slower in other areas. We keep bumping into reminders that the post-WWII era was something of an anomaly rather than a steady state. Florida is a front runner because it’s both unusually highly exposed and ideologically captured but I think much of the country isn’t far behind - just basic things like roads and sewers aren’t sustainable in many areas without increased taxes, and a lot of people do not have much margin for that. An awful lot of infrastructure is around its design lifetime already and much of that will be getting hit with increased climate stress.
We also tax at a much lower rate than we did in the post-WW2 era.
Yes - there are many areas where we could have the government soften blows, except that decades of spending by rich people have convinced large swathes of the population to believe that’s a moral peril.