Solutions for Florida’s Property Insurance Crisis & School Vax Skeptics – Top 3 Takeaways – December 6th, 2022
- Listen to the James Madison Institute. That’s generally good advice as the Florida based free-enterprise institute has been a thought leader with sound policy analysis for our state since its founding in 1987. And now, with Florida’s property insurance crisis coming to a crescendo with a second special state legislative session addressing the issue next week, it’s time for the state legislature to listen to them. On Friday, Florida’s CFO Jimmy Patronis told me hard legislative proposals had yet to materialize – which means it will be by the end of this week. The legislature needs to take a page, or perhaps 12, from the James Madison Institue's just produced policy brief entitled Road to Recovery: Clearning the Path to Meaningful Reforms in Florida’s Insurance Arena. The brief includes some of the obvious and oft discussed issues such as Florida now accounting for nearly 80% of the national property insurance litigation while our state accounts for just 8% of the insurance policies. They correctly outline how the pipeline of assignment-of-benefits from homeowners to contractors (commonly roofers) has led to litigation by attorneys in league with the shady contractors. It also includes telling new financial analysis on the property insurance industry. Most notably their findings that...
- 49 of the 52 property insurance carriers which have operated in Florida since 2017 have lost money. That is a stunning failure, not of the property insurance industry but of our state’s government to allow it to happen. That stat to me is even more eye opening than the litigation number. It’s safe to say that when over 94% of all companies operating in any business segment over the course of five years lose money you’ve got a stunning crisis on your hands that is certain to end badly. And if you were going to have an industry that had essentially been legislated out of business, you certainly wouldn’t expect it to be a state as renowned as being good for businesses as Florida. No wonder next to no carriers want to operate in Florida and Citizens is racking up record numbers of Floridians left with no other options. The James Madison Institute also identified that over the prior eight years, 71% of all money paid out by Florida’s property insurers went to generally slimy attorneys legally scamming our system with only 8%, just 8% that ended up actually going to pay policyholders for their losses. Every time you turn around there are stunning new stats to illustrate the absolute absurdity of Florida’s property insurance market. But while the policy brief spent just over five pages outlining the problems, they spent much of their brief proposing solutions with two sections – lawsuit reforms and insurance regulatory reforms and five actionable points within them. Proposed solutions include legally clarifying what constitutes insurers acting in “bad faith” to provide legal clarity, thus limiting lawsuits, tightening Citizens eligibility, restricting where Citizens can underwrite new policies but most of all...to Repeal Florida’s one-way attorney fee law. Quoting the brief: In order to restore sanity and predictability to the state’s insurance system, one-way attorney fee laws must be repealed and insurance litigants should have to follow the common-law American rule—that parties bear their own litigation costs, the rule applicable in most states and for most types of litigation. And this little nugget: All throughout, the common denominator remained: laws like the one-way attorney fee that incentivized litigation and an overall culture of “sue first and ask questions later.” Bingo. Insurance is complicated. Real fixes to our crisis less so. Kill assignment of benefits and end one-way attorney’s fees. Make it so state legislature. Better still, just let the James Madison Institute write the legislation for the special session.
- Growing vaccine skepticism. At greater than 90%, Florida’s graduation rate sits at record highs, but the vaccination rate for students is reaching fresh decade-plus lows. For over a year now, at whatever point it was exactly that we learned that we’d been sold a false premise on COVID-19 herd immunity and efficacy at prevention, I’ve suggested there would be consequences. Yes, there are Fauchists who are willing to be lied to time and again. But for many it’s a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. And about the time that many Floridians had been immunized for COVID, perhaps even boostered, and contracted COVID a time or two anyway... There’s been a lack of willingness to fool around with more COVID vaccinations. But not just those. As I mentioned as recently as Friday... I’d hypothesized that the government’s loss of trust related to the efficacy of COVID vaccines would lead to a lower acceptance rate of all vaccinations going forward. While that still remains to be seen, flu vaccination rates are down from pre-pandemic levels and fewer than half of adults in a recent study said they’re open to getting one this season. Well, a new report shows we’re also seeing it with standard child vaccinations for grade school kids. A new report from the Florida Department of Health shows that only 91.7% of school children had the traditional “required” vaccination schedule last school year. That’s the lowest rate in over a decade and is a drop of about 3% from previous levels. In total, only 27% of the state’s school districts met the state’s minimum 95% standard. And in nine districts, including Palm Beach County, fewer than 90% of kindergarten students completed immunization schedules. This almost certainly isn’t a coincidence, and the medical establishment has no one to blame but themselves given the narratives they peddled over facts regarding COVID-19 vaccinations. There are two sides to stories and one side to facts. There are consequences for misleading people and vaccination trust isn’t what it used to be with any of them as a result.