Another 45,000 homeowners policies could be leaving Citizens Property Insurance Corp. in March. Florida’s insurer of last resort has been trying to shed policyholders and their risk for the past couple of years, and the Office of Insurance Regulation recently approved another “takeout.” We discussed the overall effort and the company’s goal of moving 400,000 policies to private insurers in our Sept. 27, 2013 post.
We are talking about a bad faith lawsuit that settled for $18 million. The case is not from Florida, but, as we said in our last post, it’s rare for even legal periodicals to write about these cases. That is not to say, however, that bad faith litigation is rare.
It isn’t often that an insurance bad faith lawsuit finds its way into the news, so when one does come up we jump at the opportunity to talk about it — even if it has nothing to do with Florida.
The results of a survey conducted on behalf of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and Trusted Choice got us to thinking about what consumers know about their homeowners and auto insurance coverage. As we said in our last post, 61 percent of respondents were somewhat familiar or not familiar with the particulars of their policies.
If we have learned nothing else from all the news coverage of Healthcare.gov and rollouts of state health insurance exchanges, we have learned that most health insurance policies renew on January 1. If our health insurance is part of an employee benefit package, we probably renew our life and disability insurance at the same time. It’s routine.
Living without health insurance is like living life on eggshells. There really is danger lurking around every corner, a slip in the grocery store, a car accident or even a trip on a toy that sends someone down the stairs. Each of these could result in some massive medical bills that can be as damaging as any bodily injury.
Floridians received some bad, but not unexpected, news last week. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ recent report, the state has the highest homeowners insurance premiums in the country. At $1,933 (in 2011, the most current year available), the average rate here is almost twice the national average.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners released its annual homeowners insurance rate report last week. Floridians will not be surprised to know that our average rate of $1,933 is the highest in the country — almost twice the national average and about four times as much as the lowest ranking state.
Last week the community of Newtown, Connecticut, solemnly commemorated the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Florida residents were just as shaken as the rest of the country by the events that unfolded that day, one that will probably never leave the hearts and minds of the people directly affected by the tragedy.
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.
