ABC reported earlier today that Florida’s largest insurer had asked for a 13 percent rate increase, so I did a little lookup.
The largest insurer is called Citizens, and it’s the taxpayer supported insurer of last resort that has taken on a lot of customers fleeing from commercial insurers high prices or actual withdrawal from the state.
Turns out Citizens is asking to charge quite a bit more, apparently even before the impact of current hurricane Debby.
Florida’s largest insurer has requested a 13.5 percent rate hike but says it needs a nearly 93 percent increase to match the competitive market.
Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is currently requesting a more modest hike from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) because state regulations cap the amount rates can increase annually.
Brian Donovan, Citizens’ chief actuary, said in a hearing last week that this would increase the average price of homeowners multi-peril policies, the insurer’s most common type of policy, from $3,560 to $4,041.
Other types of policies would also see increases in varying amounts in the double digits.
But he added that rates for Citizens’ personal multi-peril policies would need to increase by 92.8 percent to be non-competitive.
Citizens President and CEO Tim Cerio said that the double-digit rate increase was necessary to reduce the insurer’s financial risk and that the decision wasn’t made “lightly.”
“We’re the state-sponsored insurer of last resort, and the insurer of last resort in any state should never be competing with the private market,” Cerio said.
I wonder what the problem is ???