Florida homeowners who are concerned about spiking insurance premiums should be prepared to wait it out a little while longer.
That’s one takeaway from House Speaker Paul Renner’s interview that aired Sunday on WJXT’s “This Week in Jacksonville.”
“It took years to get in the ditch and it will take a couple of years to get out of it,” Renner said.
Renner pointed to legislative changes that ended the “wild, wild west of litigation practices” driven by “unscrupulous contractors” that put undue pressures on insurers.
“And that had caused a lot of our insurers to go out of business and leave the state billions and billions of loss and dollars of losses. And so people looked at the state of Florida from the insurance market and said, stay away,” Renner said.
The Speaker acknowledged that the “reforms have not yet hit the consumer,” who is beset by “price increases” due to claims made during Hurricanes Ian and Nicole last year. These “are really creating some pressure on the back end of these reforms that we haven’t got out from under yet, but we will get out from under it,” Renner said.
The Speaker noted that “new insurers are coming into the market,” and they are needed given the state’s exposure via “a record number of people that insurers that are trying to take out Citizens Insurance policies.”
“And for those that don’t know, it’s supposed to be a last resort. If you can’t get anywhere else, you go to this government run Citizens program. And we have a real big number of folks that are on Citizens. We’ve got to depopulate that.”
Renner went on to blame “spikes in premiums” on “misbehavior by people that are not only contractors but lawyers who are making this a cottage industry.” By working to “rein in some of the mischief,” he said consumers will eventually benefit from a “healing” market.
Renner is the latest state official to tell Floridians to pack their patience when shopping insurance.
Gov. Ron DeSantis urged Florida homeowners to “knock on wood” and wait out the crisis during a radio interview earlier this month.
“I think they’re going to wait through this hurricane season and then I think they’re going to be willing to deploy more capital to Florida,” DeSantis said on the Howie Carr Show. “So, knock on wood, we won’t have a big storm this summer. Then I think you’re going to start to see companies see an advantage.”
Those Republicans currently not in Tallahassee are singing a somewhat different tune, meanwhile.
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott said the recent departure of Farmers Insurance was a “wake-up call” to the state.
“Stop and think about it, here’s what happens for a company like Farmers to leave,” Scott said during a press conference. “They’ve spent years and decades to build up that clientele and just walk away. So this is a wake-up call to the state.”
The departure of Farmers comes after seven other insurers went insolvent in the last year, and is an indication to many homeowners and observers that the state’s insurance market is still in crisis.
Scott is urging talks with companies leaving the state.
“What you have to do is you have to sit down with the companies,” Scott said. “State Farm had left the state before I became Governor. I sat down with State Farm and said, ‘What are your issues?’ It always comes down to fraud. It always comes down to, there’s fraud going on in the market and guess what? If there’s fraud you pay for it because insurance is a shared cost.
“So I think what the state has to do is it’s got to sit down with Farmers, State Farm, all these companies and say, ‘What are the problems?’ Then what legislation do you need to get rid of it?” Scott continued, adding that “everybody involved needs to sit down with all these insurance companies to find out why their costs going up so much.”