Insurance Commissioner: Market Climbing Back
Commissioner Mike Yaworsky said Florida’s insurance market continues to recover after reforms, but progress will take time to show up for consumers.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Some tweaks are still needed from insurance-related reforms of the past couple of years, Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky said this week, but the overall home and auto markets have stabilized.
As the Office of Insurance Regulation opened a two-day summit Wednesday at Florida State University’s Turnbull Conference Center, Yaworsky gave a “B” grade to the results so far to the legislative changes.
“We still have work to do. Consumers still … need to be able to feel the ramification of reforms, and that just takes time,” Yaworsky said. “It took eight years for us to go from a relatively healthy market in 2014 to a market on the brink of collapse in 2022. And so, it's taking time to pull out of that.”
He based the current grade on the industry having to dig out of an “F” in 2022.
“A couple of years ago … there were fewer, fewer carriers willing to even consider writing,” Yaworsky said. “Reinsurers were, if they were even willing to offer any capital, it was basically almost ‘you pay $93, and we'll give you $100 worth of coverage’.”
Legislators passed major changes in the past few years that eliminated one-way attorney fees and banned assignment of benefits, where contractors would take over policyholder claims. The efforts also imposed larger rate increases for customers of the Citizens Property Insurance Corp. to bring rates closer to private carriers and reduce the number of policies held by the state-backed insurer.
Yaworsky said the state will look to increase “transparency” so policyholders can see how their carriers are spending money on items such as reinsurance and claims payments, and to better include building code changes into rate assessments.
He noted that current building code requirements were on display when Hurricane Milton made landfall in Sarasota County in Oct. 2024. An initial projection of potential losses from the storm approached $30 billion. So far, the losses are around $6 billion, Yaworsky said.
“We see a lot of buildings now exceeding the building code, and we want to make sure that that's being recognized so consumers get it at a discount,” Yaworsky said.
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