Floridians - Important Homeowner Insurance Information

[Blueface]

This is a great article out of Orlando. Great job by this reporter for exposing the truth for what it is.
Some of you may know that I am in the insurance claims business. We don't get a very good rep at all and the lovely governor has done a very good job of making the industry look worse and play himself off as the savior. Here is an article addressing specifically what I have personally shared with many.

Newspaper columnist tackles Florida insurance issue

Orlando Sentinel looks at dicey homeowners market

© 2008 The Orlando Sentinel,
Reproduced under license from
the Copyright Clearance Center

The following is an editorial printed in the May 22 edition of the Orlando Sentinel

May God save us from Crist's insurance fix

By Mike Thomas
Columnist, The Orlando Sentinel

The first day of hurricane season is an official day of state prayer.

"Let's ask God again for mercy," says Sen. Dan Webster.

So get on your knees June 1. Pray to be delivered from what Dan and his pals in Tallahassee just did to us.

If we get seriously hit by a storm -- and once again forecasters see dark skies ahead -- we will go so many billions in debt that there already are plans for 30 years of tax increases to pay it all off.

And then each storm in years hence will only add to the burden.

Meanwhile, a $600 million tax increase is in the works because bills still are coming in from the 2005 storms.

It seems the multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout already enacted hasn't been enough.

This new tax will be slipped into your insurance bills in hopes you'll blame State Farm and USAA for it instead of the politicians.

You might think they would have learned a lesson.

But led by Gov. Charlie Crist, they made matters worse by increasing the risk of bigger tax increases to come.

And it's all to boost Charlie's poll numbers and legislative re-election campaigns in South Florida.

Dear God: Save us from self-serving politicians.

The Legislature has again frozen rates for customers of the state-run Citizens Property Insurance. This will make it three years of frozen rates for homeowners who live in the riskiest coastal locations.

Consider the fiscal soundness of doing that.

After the 2004-05 storms, Citizens Property went bankrupt because its rates were too low to cover losses.

So taxpayers have been bailing it out ever since.

The tab to date is more than $2 billion, most of this being paid with taxes added to your insurance policies.

In 2006, lawmakers called for raising rates at Citizens Property to prevent a recurrence of that. But then came Charlie Crist, who with a powerful cartel of South Florida legislators not only froze rates but rolled them back. They called it "insurance reform." Here is a simple explanation of their reform:

· People had been paying 70 cents for $1 worth of insurance coverage.

· Now they will be paying 70 cents for $1.30 worth of coverage.

Every year, the imbalance and the risk to taxpayers grow.

The political will to correct this diminishes because the cost of doing so becomes more onerous.

It's our version of Medicare.

Legislators also just expanded Citizens Property to cover $2 million mansions. So the rich in Palm Beach will get frozen, subsidized premiums while the working class in Orlando pay full freight to Allstate.

On top of all that, consider the state's catastrophe fund. Thanks to Crist, it is obligated to pay out up to $28 billion in storm damages, even though the fund has only about $3.5 billion in the bank.

After learning we may not be able to borrow the difference in today's bond market, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink tried to reduce the CAT fund risk by a measly $3 billion.

But lawmakers rejected that because it would slightly increase insurance rates in South Florida.

The projected Senate President next year, Jeff Atwater, is from South Florida and faces a tough re-election campaign. He can't have insurance rates going up.

So we are selling policies we don't know we can pay off.

It is our version of printing money.

I can't imagine anything more frightening than politicians in charge of insurance premiums.

Pray hard.