The Florida legislature and Office of Insurance Regulation should learn from insurance history, recent warnings, and common sense when it comes to building a stable Florida insurance marketplace. Former Florida Insurance Consumer Advocate, and now lawyer in the Merlin Law Group, Sean Shaw highlighted a fundamental flaw in Florida’s insurance marketplace in a recent St. Petersburg Times Letter to the Editor. He noted:

In reality, the lion’s share of the blame for the industry’s solvency issues falls squarely on its own shoulders. During the current five-year storm-free stretch, the state’s insurers have neglected to build their capital reserves to levels that would enable them to withstand the next major disaster. Instead, insurers send as much as 86 cents on the premium dollar overseas to reinsurers who are not obligated to conform to the regulations that act to protect consumers. Florida’s undercapitalized and overleveraged insurance companies are essentially slaves to these offshore reinsurers, who often charge five times the actuarial risk of loss simply because they can.

There is another dirty secret that the state’s insurance companies don’t want you to know. Despite all the self-pity, many Florida companies actually make sizable profits. Nearly every private insurer in the state has divided itself into several separate subsidiary companies that swap money in a veritable shell game to escape regulation.

According reporting by Paige St. John, between 2006 and 2008 Florida property insurers gave out more than $149 million in executive bonuses, perks and dividends to their holding companies while increasing Floridians’ rates by an average of 35 percent over the same period.

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Continue Reading Florida’s Insurance Problem is Inadequate Surplus Growth During Good Years