Florida’s insane insurance market has a dirty little secret. Know why lawmakers won’t fix it? | Opinion

The Florida property-insurance market is so complicated, lawmakers tell us. Fixing it is hard, they moan. It’s not our fault costs have gone bonkers. It’s a bunch of other stuff: too many people suing, or the bad storms that keep hitting our state, or shoddy construction.

Also lawmakers: We are really, really busy fighting drag queens and going through elementary school bookshelves with magnifying glasses to detect “wokeness.”

And yet there’s an interesting and important idea, one that has surfaced repeatedly in Florida, on how to stabilize our insane property insurance market that they should pay attention to. The Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times Tallahassee Bureau wrote about it this week. It deserves serious discussion. But it keeps getting kicked aside by Tallahassee for all the wrong reasons. Political ones, in other words.

Makes us mad

That should infuriate anyone who has looked at their insurance bill lately and seen their ever-rising premiums. Or those who have raised their own deductibles, praying all summer that they don’t get hit. Or those going bare, dropping all hurricane insurance once the house is paid off and hoping for the best, because the cost of insurance costs in this state is utterly untenable. It’s unpredictable, too, a terrible thing that can push you out of your home if you are retired and on a fixed income.

The idea that might actually help Florida’s homeowners goes like this: The state should offer hurricane insurance, while private insurers cover the rest — fire, theft. To cover the costs, the state could use a combination of Citizens Property Insurance (the state-backed “insurer of last resort” that now has almost 1.2 million policies) and the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. Windstorm premiums from Floridians would go into a common fund, rather than toward profit.

It’s neither a perfect idea nor a new one. It’s been brought up a bunch of times — in 2006, 2011, for starters, and even late last year in an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times. It’s been pushed by Republicans in Florida — former lawmakers, in fact — and business people and lawyers who all have been trying to find ways to bring the market under control. There’s even a similar model in Republican-controlled Texas, called the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, to check out for lessons. Florida TaxWatch concluded that the idea, at least the version floated in 2011, was viable.

Lawmakers cowed

But here’s the dirty little secret: The idea never goes anywhere because domestic insurers wouldn’t make as much money. That’s how beholden the Florida Legislature is to special interests.

They won’t tell you that. Who would confess to being controlled by interests that run counter to your constituents’ interests? But that’s what’s going on, as the Herald/Times story outlined.

The idea, despite its obvious value in any discussion of the market, was considered a “political hot potato,” the story said. Small insurers may struggle to pay out claims in storm-heavy years, but they were making enormous profits in storm-free years. Also, they were big political donors. Stripping hurricane premiums from their companies and putting the money into a state fund was a non-starter for political reasons.

Lawmakers insist they are trying. Last year, they held a short special session allegedly to tackle the insurance problem. They ended up passing legislation limiting lawsuits that insurers blame for many of the belly-up insolvencies and record premiums.

Will that help? Some maybe, but of course they also couch that by saying we have to wait a few years before seeing results. Wait? That’s mighty convenient for them. There’s no way to measure for sure if they did any good or are simply buying time while we all suffer.

But what about a statewide insurance pool to break the boom-and-bust cycle on insurance for good? Where’s the discussion on that?

Crickets.

Republicans in Tallahassee seem to be living in a fever dream, where wokeness is an actual enemy, and Gov. Ron DeSantis will lead them to the promised Land of Reelection. They may be in for a rude wake-up call. Their constituents, even the ones who embrace the woke wars, can’t vote for them if they’re priced out of Florida by insurance costs.

Culture wars, they should remember, don’t pay our bills.