More insurance companies are fleeing the state because of the growing threat from natural disasters.
I shit you not Florida’s CFO blames corporate wokeness
Also I didn’t know florida has a CFO
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.
Let me guess, the money goes to a private company who just happens to be run by a relative of DeSantis?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they think last year’s hurricane season was bad, wait until this year with 38°C (100°F) water.
Not saying insurance companies are good but I’ve read a lot of the problem is with insurance scams where a roofing company will tell the homeowner they can replace their roof for free with insurance, even if it’s not necessary. Then that company will sue the insurance Co if they don’t pay for it.
That’s part of it but it’s state law that made that possible, even with tort reform.
If only the gays would stop marrying the hurricanes would stop and premiums would be lower! - Florida republican voter, probably
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.
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.
So serious question, does the fact that insurance companies are giving up millions of potential customers prove that climate change/disaster is real?
IIRC, that’s part of why they’re pulling out of Florida. DeSantis made it law that they can’t change premiums based on climate change, so they’ve decided it makes more sense for them to pull out than risk huge payouts when they can’t change premiums.
Just look at the rising water temperatures. It will be an interesting hurricane season this year.
No fucking kidding, eh?
I hope that the wind shear from the el Nino holds up for the people in the US and parts of Canada. It seems like the NOAA are thinking that this el Nino might not be as much of a saving grace as usual. The current temperatures are worse than they were at the peak of any other hurricaine season, and this one is still just getting started. I’m concerned with how bad the temperatures will be at the peak.
From what I read, we haven’t really experienced this before. This year’s sea temperatures are the hottest on record. We’re already getting to the point where things will become increasingly difficult to predict.
Wait, this El Nino was supposed to be a saving grace? I’ve only heard of it meaning hotter surface temperatures. Hot summers, mild winters are what I associate with El Nino, and the opposite with La Nina.
The things I’ve read have been saying that the last few years of La Nina have made the warning trend seem more mild and now this El Nino will show how much things have actually progressed in that time.
