re: FL Citizens Insurance is tired of being the primary provider

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insurance is nothing more then a scam
when you finally need the coverage you have been paying decades for they are nowhere to be found or they want to price gouge you to death
pretty soon the deductibles will be $20,000 for hurricanes which means you have to pay for your roof

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To take a page out of the playbook of the right better for you to pay for your roof in its entirety than for me to pay for part of it. You decided to live in an area where Hurricanes happen. Most of us do not. I am not saying that, I understand risk and how it is mitigated, but lots of people are saying it....

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I'm just trying to point out there is another cost to increased home values.

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Yep, fair enough.

Citizens needs to be the highest priced insurance as explained in the article, because it’s a last resort option if no private insurer will write for a location. According to the article, Citizens’ rates are competitive with and lower than the private insurers. Hence why it needs to increase its rates so dramatically.

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) Florida has had severe losses in the past 5 years 4

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Who cares about the past five years, they’re worried about the next five with warmer Gulf temperatures and more hurricanes which mean some will hit Florida

Here is an idea.

Force insurance companies to write policies statewide.

Create a state sponsored self insurance or reinsurance fund to cover catastrophic losses on hurricane years

The fund is paid for by an assessment on all policies.

The fund kicks in when the amount of losses exceed certain percentage of the policies covered.

Your traditional companies are responsible for writing the polices and everyday incidents like fire and other typical loss claims. They are also responsible for inspecting and writing the checks for losses.

The state will act more like a reinsurance company than an insurance provider. Policies can be assessed costs based on wind zones and discounts based on hardiness.

Disagreements on hurricane claims, losses, and reimbursements for losses are now handled by arbitration instead of the courtroom unless a company acts in bad faith.

The problem with this is that it comes on the heels of them price fixing homeowners premiums - to which major carriers said screw you and pulled out - they are begging insurers to come back because citizens is oversaturated - what they are doing isn't forward thinking - it's covering up past mistakes - regardless an open market is needed - as it is everywhere

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So the OP is fake?

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Citizens Insurance isn’t a private entity.

It’s the equivalent of Medicare or Medicaid for private homeowners insurance.It’s underwritten and run as a subsidiary of the state of FL.

Think of it as FL self insuring for residents who aren’t eligible for private insurance.

The reason they aren’t eligible for private insurance is that the national and international underwriting entities that are reinsuring the coverage you’d get from State Farm, Allstate etc are refusing to write policies in coastal areas of FL.

Allstate, etc sell you a policy but often use an underwriter to insure that policy and the margin between the price you pay and what they pay is basically their operating margin.

When those underwriters won’t write for an area they either have to actually operate as an insurance company with real risk and exposure or leave.

Here instead of saying there’s a 35% increased risk of a loss and increasing the premiums they charge they just said “no”.

So to keep the market afloat FL assumes the policy via Citizens and writes the owner a policy otherwise the property would be impossible to write a mortgage for.

An actual agent would be able to discuss the nuances but in a nutshell that’s what’s going on.

The question as to why the underwriters actually left is very contentious and possibly political.

Pay cash, self insure.

Will be the only way to own property in the future.

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Dates back to the Crist days, he completely fricked the insurance industry in FL

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I’m not a Charlie Crist fan, but this is an entire gulf coast plus FL and coastal Carolina issue.

Crist didn’t do this. Citizens is possibly the only thing preventing a complete collapse of the FL real estate market right now.

I want to know why the underwriters left. The governors of all the impacted states should be investigating the insurance cartel to determine what led into that decision and get it fixed before there is an actual housing market collapse.

I’m an insurance agent in FL, this isn’t on the current governors. The carriers left because they went insolvent or were losing their arse with cat losses and reinsurance costs.

FL represents 76% of insurance litigation in the nation. In the last decade 15 billion was paid out in claims and only 8% went to claimants. The rest went to attorneys and public adjusters