More insurance companies are fleeing the state because of the growing threat from natural disasters.
Mr. DeSantis, why can’t the people of Florida get privately owned homeowners insurance from capitalist corporations?
Why does Florida suck at capitalism?
Is it because of climate change … or is it because fascism isn’t actually good for business, it just pretends to be, while assassinating the businesses it doesn’t like?
Could it be … BOTH?
Either way, you’re a piece of shit, Mr. DeSantis, and you can go to hell.
I shit you not Florida’s CFO blames corporate wokeness
Also I didn’t know florida has a CFO
Running government like a business = bad at capitalism
“Let’s run the government like a corporation. We’ll give people the worst quality product possible at the highest price possible!”
Running the government like a business sure sounded a lot better when businesses took care of their people, huh?
Chief Florida Officer?
No worries, now the Florida government will offer their own insurance in retaliation, to show them corporates who’s boss.
And that’s how, children, the capitalists became socialists.
It already exists. It’s called Citizens Property Insurance and I’m one of over a million subscribers to it. Every private company is at least 20% more expensive or the state could sell my policy to the private company.
Howdy fellow citizens customer! As a token of our new friendship id like to give you 2 of the giant grasshoppers and 1 albino lizard.
Let me guess, the money goes to a private company who just happens to be run by a relative of DeSantis?
Not exactly. Citizens has been around for a long time. If you want to find some of the usual GOP grift here in FL, take look at all DeSantis’ donors/college buddies/whatever that are now getting the legal work for defending the state against Disney’s lawsuits. That’s a lot of money…but that’s a separate issue from Citizens, which legitimately fills a need.
Insurance companies are about the purest form of capitalism around. If they aren’t making money, they aren’t going to participate. This is going to be a problem for California, Florida, Louisiana, and places in the Mountain West.
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I think the whole western half of the country is strained for water, so might have to do with that.
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It’s probably the fire
“Unfortunately, Florida’s insurance market has become challenging in recent years,” the company said in a statement emailed to CBS MoneyWatch. “Last year’s catastrophic hurricane season contributed to an unprecedented rise in reinsurance rates, making it more costly for insurance companies to operate.”
This is hilarious and sould crushingly unsurprising. People actually ended up needing to use the insurance the companies were offering soooo they are just no longer offering it. Proving once again (for the millionth time) insurance companies have absolutely zero desire or feel any moral obligation to actually help people. It is 100% purely a money making operation. The millisecond they actually have to help any of their customers out, they will bend over backwards to get out of it and if they can’t, they’ll just leave entirely and not insure you. Beautiful. God I hate insurance so much.
They are a business and their business model shows they can’t make profit in Florida any longer. It would be morally unjustifiable to continue operating in Florida, to their employees and shareholders.
These aren’t non-profit companies.
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Are you actually surprised that an insurance company is not there for the good of the people, but to make money? They did keep their contractual obligations and paid out their customers, so you cannot fault them for that.
And what the insurance companies are doing is quite normal behavior. They analyze business risks and move out of fields that are not profitable. They are now telling you that they will no longer cover you so you can find another insurance to take over business. That those other insurance companies are more expensive is just founded in the fact that Florida is already a risky state, and the risks just skyrocket through global warming. And with the water temperatures rising as they do, I expect this year to have an interesting hurricane season.
People complain again that they cannot afford to move to safer places. Maybe now they can start thinking whether they can afford not to move to safer places instead.
Insurance doesn’t work very well for things like hurricanes. When big events happen that cause large percentages of their policy holders to file claims at the same time, it results in large payouts which causes increases in price. When prices go up, people don’t insure. This combined with the fact that florida gets hurricanes means prices for insurance are high.
Maybe the state could help by introducing laws to help combat insurance fraud, but that could lead to consumers getting fucked by their insurance companies.
Insurance can work just fine for things like hurricanes. Insurance companies have several methods to address it. They’re all effectively variations of buying insurance policies themselves.
Re-insurance pools are a close analog. It’s basically a bunch of insurance companies from around the planet getting together and agreeing to pool risks. Big companies also use a bunch of funky financial instruments to simulate insurance.
There’s some risk of increased systemic correlation (eg climate change may increase the risk that major hurricanes hit multiple areas around the planet simultaneously). That’s largely mitigated in that we can see it coming. Climate change is pretty prominent in their models and they can adjust premiums or stop offering policies, over time.
The bigger risk is in synthetic systemic risk. It’s burned us a bunch of times already and it’s gonna do it again. Those giant global re-insurance pools are almost certainly fine, and worth the risk, if we just use them for their intended purpose. But history shows that we’ll end up creating derivatives contracts on them and those contracts will get leveraged. Those leveraged pools end up merging and turning into giant financial time bombs.
You are being downvoted unfairly. There is greed at play, but there is math and economics as well.
The state could also help by reviewing building codes and infrastructure to make the losses due to hurricanes less severe but, with Florida republican votes not understanding the benefits of government helping address externalities for the benefit of everyone, there’s no chance the situation will improve there…
Most insurance companies strive to avoid excessive profits, honestly and aim for a combined ratio of something less than 5% profit. It’s a fairly competitive field, getting greedy results in losing policies and is very price reactive. Consumers can change pretty easily and do so regularly.
If they think last year’s hurricane season was bad, wait until this year with 38°C (100°F) water.
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I’d say Arizona and Texas are at higher risk than California, unless earthquakes get way more frequent and bad.
The risk in CA is that they have built so many communities in areas that are prone to wild fires (and in some cases are even part of the natural eco system) that is inevitable that if they rebuild that it will burn down again. They also have high material costs, higher labor costs, and more stringent building codes (rebuilding to code can get really expensive). Lastly CA has a more highly regulated insurance market which protects consumers, but makes it less profitable for insurance companies. While IMO this is a good thing it has ripple effects on whether or not the private market wants to participate.
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What are you doing on the internet? You’re supposed to STOP, DROP & ROLL!!!
In all seriousness, I hope you are well and surviving.
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Wildfires aren’t the issue with Arizona, extreme heat is.
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If only the gays would stop marrying the hurricanes would stop and premiums would be lower! - Florida republican voter, probably
It’s the fault of the trans athletes and books that use the word “gay”!
Not probably, they have been on record saying so.
Our Baptists in Illinois when I was a kid blamed 2000s hurricanes on “sin” such as gay marriage, so that’s correct.
(In case you are wondering, I am no longer Christian— let alone Baptist. I am agnostic theist though!)
If the hurricanes had guns this wouldn’t be happening.
Even CBS does clickbait now. First sentence in article:
AAA will not renew the auto and home insurance policies for some customers in Florida, joining a growing list of insurers dialing back their presence in the Sunshine State amid a growing risk of natural disasters.Some customers. Will that be dozens, thousands, millions?
I bet even they don’t know the specific number. But certain conditions like being in a hurricane-prone area or zones not performing the maintenance on structures that help deal with natural disasters would probably cause those people to no longer be insurable as it predictable that they would pay out more money to more people when things go sideways. This is information for their stockholders, so they don’t get sued for not maximizing profit.
Wonder how DeSantis or his successor will spin things when the only option left is to make a government run single payer system for anyone to have coverage.
Unfortunately, Florida already has a socialized insurance “corporation”, Citizens Property Insurance Corp. Tens of thousands of policy holders this year were forced to move to other insurance companies if those companies would offer them insurance for up to 20% higher than they would get with Citizens.
You can only get Citizens if you cant get insurance through any other provider. Citizens coverage requires you to get flood insurance regardless of if you’re in a flood zone or not (arguably, this is smart for Florida, but does make insurance much more expensive), and the policy doesn’t cover nearly as much as you would get with other insurance companies.
As more and more news articles come out about various home owners insurance companies leaving Florida we’re seeing more companion articles about how Citizens is completely fucked up. To tl;dr some stuff, basically if Florida sees a bad hurricane and Citizens has to pay out, everyone who’s on citizens is royally fucked because they just don’t have the money to pay out.
I have all the confidence that if Florida lost all of the free market insurance and was forced to provide a socialized universal insurance scheme that Republicans would continue to run it as competently as they currently are.
Imagine if they did health insurance…
And all of that is just lip service bullshit waiting for a government emergency declaration to bail them out. Again, and, again, and again
Yep they’ll ask for a bailout from the federal government, and when anyone brings up anything about the hypocrisy, the lack of private insurance companies, or the mismanagement of the state run insurance fund, they’ll respond with “How DARE you politicize a disaster such as this!” in their special, concern-trolling sort of way.
Sounds like it would be a good idea to defederate from Florida. Then they can say whatever they want in their own instance while everyone else carries on with their not Florida lives.
Take away their ability to offer car insurance in Florida too then.
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Is all of Florida a risk, or only down state?
