News & Resources

The House of Representatives is getting closer to acting on legislation addressing the rate hikes imposed by the National Flood Insurance Program. While the companion bill to the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act passed by the Senate has more than 225 co-sponsors, it is looking less and less likely that the House will follow in the Senate’s footsteps. What is not clear at all is what direction the House bill will take and how far it will stray from the Senate’s; House leadership has been mum on the details.

We are finishing up our discussion of the Senate bill that would delay National Flood Insurance Program rate increases. The bill was tied to another insurance-related bill, the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act.

We are picking up where our Feb. 4 post left off and getting into the particulars of the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. The U.S. Senate has tied the NARAB bill to the Homeowner Flood Insurance Availability Act, the bill that would postpone many flood insurance rate increases resulting from implementation of yet another law, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act.

We are back to discussing the bill passed by the U.S. Senate that will delay flood insurance rate hikes. The Senate combined the National Flood Insurance Program bill to another insurance bill, the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. We talked about the flood insurance bill in our Jan. 31, 2014, post. Here, we will tackle the NARAB bill.

Seconds after we published our last post, the U.S. Senate passed the bill that included both the Homeowner Flood Insurance Availability Act and the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. The flood insurance act will keep flood insurance subsidies in place for four years. During that time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency — the agency responsible for the National Flood Insurance Program — will complete an affordability study and perfect new flood maps.

The time has come, it seems, to talk of flood insurance rate hike delays, of months or years and agent licensing and economically distressed policyholders — and, as Lewis Carroll would add, whether pigs have wings. The debate over the rate hikes associated with implementation of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act continues in both the House and the Senate, and the White House has chimed in as well.

We are discussing the various efforts under way to address the flood insurance rate hikes brought about with the implementation of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012. In our last post, we talked about a couple of proposals in Congress, neither of which, it seems, will pass before the end of the year.

The Battle of Biggert-Waters rages on. The state of Florida is fighting on a number of fronts to halt or to mitigate the premium increases that homeowners are facing under the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act. So far, homeowners have not gained much ground.

The National Flood Insurance Program is a program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Congress made some changes in 2012 that are prompting a big reaction in South Florida. Properties that are mortgaged and fall in a flood zone require flood insurance, and in Miami, that means a lot of people pay these premiums. In fact, 37 percent of all flood insurance policies cover properties in Florida, and 47,362 of those properties can be found in Miami-Dade County.

We are wrapping up our discussion of the responsibilities, accountabilities and jurisdiction of the Federal Insurance Office. The FIO was created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and insurance companies are wondering what exactly to make of it.