5 ms·

> Regulators asked for that [better metrics] in 2023 but lawmakers rejected it, claiming it would “upset the apple cart” of Florida’s insurance industry. I don

by speff 2y ago

> Regulators asked for that [better metrics] in 2023 but lawmakers rejected it, claiming it would “upset the apple cart” of Florida’s insurance industry. I don't disagree with the lawmaker's stance on this one. FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change. Why would I want to run an insurance operation in FL without an actual incentive (read: more money)? There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this?

dsr_ 2y ago
You raise the rates on everyone to cover actual expected losses, and make sure that the insurance companies don't commit fraud. Then people will say that they can't afford Florida. And they will be correct.
- speff 2y ago
  Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then? It's rhetorical, since we see in this post's article what happens. But my point is that something like this was more-or-less inevitable. [1]: https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-rate-reductions-miami-dade-county-auto-insurance https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan... [2]: https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-helping-to-reduce-runaway-home-insurance-premium-costs https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-he...
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    They want the socialism benefits wrapped in populist authoritarianism to appease their tribal and in group belief system. “The only moral benefits are my benefits.” With Florida climate risk accelerating, the new admin telling states FEMA is unnecessary, and ~15-20% of Florida homeowners going without property insurance due to cost, this will manifest in an unfortunate but entirely expected outcome: catastrophic economic loss at some point in the future with no recourse for the majority impacted (citizen homeowners and GSE investors alike).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tqi 2y ago
      Followed by a federal bailout, presumably
  - SaintGhurka 2y ago
    >> What happens then? Same thing that's happening in CA. Insurers pull out of the state and non-renew policies. I'm sure it was satisfying to see the regulator stick it to the insurance companies, but you can't force them to write policies if they don't think it's worth it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - WillPostForFood 2y ago
      This is literally the opposite of what is happening. They are reforming laws to decrease costs, and have had new insurers enter the market. https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-for-florida-we-ask-when-will-relief-arrive https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-f...
  - quickthrowman 2y ago
    > Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then? Eventually, property values would be drastically reduced and home insurance would be more per year than the mortgage. If it’s 80% mortgage 20% insurance premiums now, maybe it will flip to something like 35%/65% mortgage/insurance with property values halved (or more). I’m ignoring the fact that the replacement cost of a home has little to do with the property value since most of that value is in the land, but the land would also be worth less. Regardless, a shitload of mortgages would be underwater, impacting both lenders and borrowers on a massive scale. Vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed. Or, property values remain the same and the poor have to leave Florida. This assumes there are enough people that can move to Florida and pay the same for a property with doubled or tripled insurance premiums, which is probably less likely than the first scenario I laid out.
    - dsr_ 2y ago
      It's a little odd to say "vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed" without noting that this is the result of spending, borrowing and lending irrationally. It's not so much that the mortgages are underwater. It's that the houses are.
    - SkiFire13 2y ago
      Wouldn't the insurance being twice the mortgage mean that in the time you pay your mortgage the house is expected to be destroyed and rebuilt twice?
Clubber 2y ago
This is accurate at the macro level, but on the micro level the insurance companies are doing nasty insurance company stuff like doubling rates in ~5 years, requiring people to replace their roofs every 10 years instead of every 30 years (at their own expense) and low balling claims expecting most people to not hire a lawyer to fight for them when their house is in shambles. They've really gotten shady over the last few years. These aren't fly-by-night insurance companies, these are companies you've all heard of that make hundreds of billions of dollars a year, companies with blue logos and red logos; how American. The other problem is, as most of you may know, to get a home loan to buy a house, you are required by the banks to carry insurance. This makes it a near monopoly that these companies are taking full advantage of. I'm sure the legislature is happy to take campaign contributions from these companies to ensure the status quo. No one will get arrested. You know the drill. I agree insurance will be more expensive in a hurricane prone area, but all the shady stuff is what people are complaining about.
- jghn 2y ago
  As a state, they consistently vote for politicians who are anti-regulation and pro-capitalism. What do they expect to happen here?
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Clubber 2y ago
    I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue. To be fair, a lot of Democratic politicians destroyed their economies with extended lockdowns, and also being extremely generous with prosecuting theft, among other things, so Florida isn't the only one with bad choices. I'm not defending DeSantis, but it seems the job of US politician attracts a certain type of person, regardless of what color their flag is. The longer they stay in, the more comfortable they get with being, lets say, morally flexible.
consumer451 2y ago
> FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change. I was a South FL resident for half of my life. Either the insurance pool is spread across the entire country, subsidizing FL, or just stop. FL will soon be uninsurable in the free market.
- bluedino 2y ago
  Isn't this what happened in areas of California?
  - consumer451 2y ago
    If I understand the situation correctly, yes. The core of insurance is Lloyd's of London. They do the math, aka the re-insurance numbers. If a retail insurance company can't get re-insurance for a local market, then they exit that local market. That is what happened prior to the LA fires. The math saw it coming, re-insurance was pulled. Both CA and FL are high-risk, and each have state-backed insurance systems of last resort. The more that these get tapped, the more unsustainable it all becomes. Climate change, anthropogenic "or otherwise," sucks for insurance.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      You're missing one key piece of the puzzle: consumer insurance rates in California are regulated by the California Department of Insurance led by an elected Insurance Commissioner. It's the agency responsible for regulating rates and how fast insurers can raise them. In the last decade, it's been very slow to allow insurers to raise those rates to account for the risk they've recalculated. Insurers didn't pull out because the state is uninsurable, but because they were being hamstrung. Properly priced in fire insurance can be expensive here depending on location but it's not like Florida where there's predictable water damage to most houses in the path of a hurricane every 5-10 years. These past fires were the most destructive in history and burned under twenty thousand structures in the fifth largest economy in the world - it was traumatic but relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and well within the state's capacity to bail out without federal assistance (unlike Florida and the National Flood Insurance program which has sucked up tens of billions of federal funds since Katrina).
amluto 2y ago
> There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this? Are there? As far as I can tell, hurricanes: - Destroy buildings that are not properly designed and built to withstand enough wind. The industry and modern codes know how to deal with this for new and sufficiently retrofitted construction. I don’t even think the measures needed are particularly expensive. - Damage to structures due to wind-blown rain. The more informed architects and engineers know how to deal with this. A very brief search suggests that even the Miami-Dade code hasn’t caught up: for example, you can still build a vented roof assembly in Florida. This is a poor idea in a humid climate even without hurricane, and those vents are problematic in a hurricane. Getting rid of them in new or remodeled construction is easy and not very expensive, but architects and builders need to learn how. - Damage to structures due to flying things near them. In a city setting, this can be mitigated by building structures that don’t turn into flying junk and enforcing requirements for people to keep their yards clean. - Flooding: this will cause massive damage to whole cities. An interesting property of the issues other than flooding is that the most vulnerable structures may get destroyed by hurricanes, leaving behind the less vulnerable structures.

by speff 2y ago

dsr_ 2y ago

You raise the rates on everyone to cover actual expected losses, and make sure that the insurance companies don't commit fraud. Then people will say that they can't afford Florida. And they will be correct.

speff 2y ago
Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then? It's rhetorical, since we see in this post's article what happens. But my point is that something like this was more-or-less inevitable. [1]: https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desantis-announces-rate-reductions-miami-dade-county-auto-insurance https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2025/governor-ron-desan... [2]: https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-helping-to-reduce-runaway-home-insurance-premium-costs https://www.floridapeninsula.com/blog/florida-legislation-he...
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  They want the socialism benefits wrapped in populist authoritarianism to appease their tribal and in group belief system. “The only moral benefits are my benefits.” With Florida climate risk accelerating, the new admin telling states FEMA is unnecessary, and ~15-20% of Florida homeowners going without property insurance due to cost, this will manifest in an unfortunate but entirely expected outcome: catastrophic economic loss at some point in the future with no recourse for the majority impacted (citizen homeowners and GSE investors alike).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tqi 2y ago
    Followed by a federal bailout, presumably
- SaintGhurka 2y ago
  >> What happens then? Same thing that's happening in CA. Insurers pull out of the state and non-renew policies. I'm sure it was satisfying to see the regulator stick it to the insurance companies, but you can't force them to write policies if they don't think it's worth it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - WillPostForFood 2y ago
    This is literally the opposite of what is happening. They are reforming laws to decrease costs, and have had new insurers enter the market. https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-for-florida-we-ask-when-will-relief-arrive https://www.wptv.com/money/real-estate-news/9-new-insurers-f...
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  > Agreed, but it seems like the people of FL want a populist who will prevent the companies from raising rates[0][1]. What happens then? Eventually, property values would be drastically reduced and home insurance would be more per year than the mortgage. If it’s 80% mortgage 20% insurance premiums now, maybe it will flip to something like 35%/65% mortgage/insurance with property values halved (or more). I’m ignoring the fact that the replacement cost of a home has little to do with the property value since most of that value is in the land, but the land would also be worth less. Regardless, a shitload of mortgages would be underwater, impacting both lenders and borrowers on a massive scale. Vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed. Or, property values remain the same and the poor have to leave Florida. This assumes there are enough people that can move to Florida and pay the same for a property with doubled or tripled insurance premiums, which is probably less likely than the first scenario I laid out.
  - dsr_ 2y ago
    It's a little odd to say "vast amounts of wealth would be destroyed" without noting that this is the result of spending, borrowing and lending irrationally. It's not so much that the mortgages are underwater. It's that the houses are.
  - SkiFire13 2y ago
    Wouldn't the insurance being twice the mortgage mean that in the time you pay your mortgage the house is expected to be destroyed and rebuilt twice?

Clubber 2y ago

This is accurate at the macro level, but on the micro level the insurance companies are doing nasty insurance company stuff like doubling rates in ~5 years, requiring people to replace their roofs every 10 years instead of every 30 years (at their own expense) and low balling claims expecting most people to not hire a lawyer to fight for them when their house is in shambles. They've really gotten shady over the last few years. These aren't fly-by-night insurance companies, these are companies you've all heard of that make hundreds of billions of dollars a year, companies with blue logos and red logos; how American. The other problem is, as most of you may know, to get a home loan to buy a house, you are required by the banks to carry insurance. This makes it a near monopoly that these companies are taking full advantage of. I'm sure the legislature is happy to take campaign contributions from these companies to ensure the status quo. No one will get arrested. You know the drill. I agree insurance will be more expensive in a hurricane prone area, but all the shady stuff is what people are complaining about.

jghn 2y ago
As a state, they consistently vote for politicians who are anti-regulation and pro-capitalism. What do they expect to happen here?
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
  [dead]
- Clubber 2y ago
  I think the last Democrat who ran against DeSantis got caught smoking crack in a hotel room with a male hooker. Florida doesn't seem to have a lot of great choices. Pick the corrupt person, red or blue. To be fair, a lot of Democratic politicians destroyed their economies with extended lockdowns, and also being extremely generous with prosecuting theft, among other things, so Florida isn't the only one with bad choices. I'm not defending DeSantis, but it seems the job of US politician attracts a certain type of person, regardless of what color their flag is. The longer they stay in, the more comfortable they get with being, lets say, morally flexible.

consumer451 2y ago

> FL's in a bad spot where home insurance in particular is unsustainable given the increasing threat from climate change. I was a South FL resident for half of my life. Either the insurance pool is spread across the entire country, subsidizing FL, or just stop. FL will soon be uninsurable in the free market.

bluedino 2y ago
Isn't this what happened in areas of California?
- consumer451 2y ago
  If I understand the situation correctly, yes. The core of insurance is Lloyd's of London. They do the math, aka the re-insurance numbers. If a retail insurance company can't get re-insurance for a local market, then they exit that local market. That is what happened prior to the LA fires. The math saw it coming, re-insurance was pulled. Both CA and FL are high-risk, and each have state-backed insurance systems of last resort. The more that these get tapped, the more unsustainable it all becomes. Climate change, anthropogenic "or otherwise," sucks for insurance.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    You're missing one key piece of the puzzle: consumer insurance rates in California are regulated by the California Department of Insurance led by an elected Insurance Commissioner. It's the agency responsible for regulating rates and how fast insurers can raise them. In the last decade, it's been very slow to allow insurers to raise those rates to account for the risk they've recalculated. Insurers didn't pull out because the state is uninsurable, but because they were being hamstrung. Properly priced in fire insurance can be expensive here depending on location but it's not like Florida where there's predictable water damage to most houses in the path of a hurricane every 5-10 years. These past fires were the most destructive in history and burned under twenty thousand structures in the fifth largest economy in the world - it was traumatic but relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and well within the state's capacity to bail out without federal assistance (unlike Florida and the National Flood Insurance program which has sucked up tens of billions of federal funds since Katrina).

amluto 2y ago

> There ARE going to be multiple city-leveling hurricanes in the future - how do people expect to be able to pay for this? Are there? As far as I can tell, hurricanes: - Destroy buildings that are not properly designed and built to withstand enough wind. The industry and modern codes know how to deal with this for new and sufficiently retrofitted construction. I don’t even think the measures needed are particularly expensive. - Damage to structures due to wind-blown rain. The more informed architects and engineers know how to deal with this. A very brief search suggests that even the Miami-Dade code hasn’t caught up: for example, you can still build a vented roof assembly in Florida. This is a poor idea in a humid climate even without hurricane, and those vents are problematic in a hurricane. Getting rid of them in new or remodeled construction is easy and not very expensive, but architects and builders need to learn how. - Damage to structures due to flying things near them. In a city setting, this can be mitigated by building structures that don’t turn into flying junk and enforcing requirements for people to keep their yards clean. - Flooding: this will cause massive damage to whole cities. An interesting property of the issues other than flooding is that the most vulnerable structures may get destroyed by hurricanes, leaving behind the less vulnerable structures.