Florida insurance costs get even worse. Lawmakers are too busy being anti-woke to see | Opinion

We know all too well that Florida property insurance costs have been skyrocketing, with no end in sight. Now there’s a new study that shows just how bad it’s gotten, and it’s even worse than we thought.

According to the data analysis company LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the state’s property insurance costs are up by an incredible 57% since 2015 — nearly triple the national average of 21%, as the Miami Herald reported.

If that weren’t enough misery, Florida distinguished itself in another way: Insurance costs have been rising faster in Florida than in any other state.

Given all of that, you might expect to see the governor and Legislature running around as though their hair was on fire, trying to come up with fixes for our crippled insurance market before regular, non-rich Floridians are forced out and lawmakers get blamed for destroying the middle class.

Lawmakers distracted

But that’s the kind of logic that worked in saner times. In 2023, Florida’s leaders are so busy trying to get Gov. Ron DeSantis into the White House — with a legislative session tailored to his agenda, no matter the cost — that they can’t be bothered to spend much time on insurance, even though it’s a complicated and important issue that affects regular people.

No, in Florida, the long-running and worsening property insurance crisis has been buried under an avalanche of anti-woke measures, the ones DeSantis seems to think will carry him to Washington.

That’s a dangerous strategy. As the Florida governor hits the campaign trail in places like Iowa, he leaves himself vulnerable to charges that he’s not taking care of business at home.

For example, on Wednesday, the governor was set to visit the U.S. southern border. It’s a clear attempt to generate more headlines on immigration, following another taxpayer-financed stunt in which Florida flew migrants from Texas to California. Meanwhile, Floridians back home will be facing record hikes in flood insurance — an average hike of 131%. Where’s the governor’s outrage on that?

The picture gets even bleaker for homeowners. They’ll be squeezed by a new requirement passed by the Legislature that says anyone who has a Citizens homeowners insurance policy will have to buy flood insurance. And Citizens Insurance, the state-backed insurer of last resort that covers over 1.1 million Floridians, wants to raise rates 14%.

Florida has hurricanes, and they’re increasing in ferocity. It has a lot of coastline that makes the state more prone to the storms. It has an enormous problem with sea rise and climate change that’s only going to get worse.

Shirking their duty

Those are the hard problems that we elect state lawmakers to tackle. But they won’t. They won’t talk about whether it’s smart to rebuild in vulnerable coastal areas. They won’t dig deep into the policies that created this fragile insurance marketplace. The won’t buck the system long enough to do some nitty-gritty policy work in this state.

The most they do is nibble around the edges, like when they passed a law this year focused on making it harder for people to sue their insurance companies — a measure that’s supposed to help keep insurers’ costs down though we have yet to see that. All the while, they beat the drum on anti-woke issues, never pausing long enough to see that people in this state are hurting.

Floridians deserve better than having critical issues like property insurance shunted to the back of the line amid DeSantis’ shiny new political hopes. The work of the Legislature and the governor isn’t done just because he has launched a presidential campaign.

The state is facing a property insurance crisis. Where are our leaders?

This story was originally published June 7, 2023 at 3:57 PM with the headline "Florida insurance costs get even worse. Lawmakers are too busy being anti-woke to see | Opinion."