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Florida Residents Flee State as Insurance Premiums Skyrocket up to 900%
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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They were laughing at Californians when it was happening to us (very very recently) thinking that it was the result of "liberal policymaking".
Well, how does it feel, Florida? Are you ready to put aside our differences and go after our real common enemy, the for-profit insurance industry and climate deniers? Because I promise you, this is only going to get worse unless we force them to change things.
I'm sure DeSantis can fix this by just "fighting woke" more, right? /s
He probably does think that. He could spin rising premiums as speculation based on climate change belief.
Watch: More legislation on insurance prices in the state.
Or, they could pull a North Carolina and outlaw any discussion of sea level rise.
Seriously, there are places where climate change (discussion) is banned? This is mind blowing
We should just ban it everywhere, and that's it, problem solved 🤦♂️
It's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.
Lord, don't even get me started on NC property insurance. Their solution to increasing rates for many years was to mandate that rates couldn't exceed x, based on what they believed was appropriate.
Protip: It wasn't appropriate. I've been out of that game for long enough now that I don't know if they ever fixed it, but it was bad - basically if you couldn't write a policy within x% of the expected rate, the risk had to be ceded to the state's reinsurance facility, which drastically limited the available coverage.
DON'T GIVE THE MAN IDEAS
He can't beat big business. If he tries it will ruin him even more than he is already ruined. Give him all the ideas.
He will pass a new law allowing him to fire insurance companies’ boards and install his own people. Make America Florida! Yeehaw!
Insurers aren’t really to blame here. Florida is a fundamentally high-risk place to build and live now, and will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future due to climate change. Even a non-profit insurer would need to price Florida insurance at a premium, lest its funds be exhausted when the inevitable category-6 hurricane hits the state.
Arguably the ones most to blame (after the fossil fuel industry, for putting us in this position in the first place of course) is corrupt politicians and developers who allow such shoddy construction in the state in the first place.
We don't just allow construction in risky places, we subsidize it. If you're an owner or developer and you wanna put your own money at risk by building in risky places, you should be allowed to do that. Just don't expect me to pay for it through taxes and FEMA flood insurance.
The category of hurricane isn't the problem, it's the frequency. 5 category 2s are way worse than 1 cat 4 or 5, in terms of economic cost, typically.
I was using cat6 as a stand-in for “all the bad stuff”. There’s never been a category 6 hurricane before.
Maybe it's not quite comparable to the situation in California, now that I think about it. Florida has always been in the path of devastating hurricanes for as long as I can remember. There is a degree of assumed risk living there. In California, these massive wildfires almost never happened and now suddenly it happens every year without fail no matter how hard we try to contain them. I live in an area that has never been hit by a wildfire, but because California as a whole has been hit so hard so many times recently, rates get raised to untenable levels and State Farm won't even write you a policy. It's completely mad.
Like, I get it, it's not the insurance company's fault that we live in the path of predictable destruction, but there has to be a better solution than "move somewhere else if you don't like it". I wonder if we can learn something from studying the insurance models of other countries that are prone to disaster (Island nations in Asia that are frequently hit by typhoons, for example) and adapting that to how policies are tailored here?
Honestly I'm on team insurance in these cases. The US is filthy rich and we have tons of highly habitable land. Why are we wasting resources subsidizing some people choosing to live in comfortable, risky locations?
For those stuck in poverty: that does suck but I consider that an independent issue.
Free hand of the market is giving them an invisible bitchslap.
Soon they'll be "free" from insurance.
Good. Subsidizing risky behavior, as we do with some kinds of disaster insurance, encourages risky behavior. Rising insurance costs are the market telling people to stop living in certain places. We'd do well to listen and stop living in places like Florida so much.
Nah. Republicans never admit when they are wrong.