Orlando Sentinel
by Mike Thomas
April 25, 2011
A Republican state senator is making a last deserate attempt to make sure people in Orlando continue subsidizing property insurance on the coast.
This comes from Sen. Mike Fasano, who happens to be from New Port Richey.
When last I wrote about Citizens, legislators were working on a bill to allow rates to go up between 15 and 25 percent a year. That is what a lot of policy holders of private insurance have been living through. But somehow, Fasano thinks Citizens customers should be exempt from market forces. And in a major laugher, he actually called the long-overdue rate hike proposals a “tax increase.”
Is this guy serious. The only people getting hit with tax increases are non-Citizens customers who have bail out the carrier after major storms. We got hit in 2004 and again in 2005.
This has to stop. Fasono’s latest excuse to block the rates legislation is that the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported Gov. Rick Scott wants to eventually abolish Citizens.
Well, duh! Of course, he does.
The Herald Tribune then reported that legislators are trying to boot people out of Citizens even though it has the strongest books of any insurer in Florida.
Well, duh again. There’s a reason for that.
This was from today’s St. Petersburg Times:
“About 72 percent of Citizens’ revenue in 2009 came from assessments paid by Floridians through their property, automobile and other types of insurance. The money covers losses incurred during the many hurricanes that hit the state in the past decade. Its policyholder premiums account for only 21 percent of its revenue.”
Of course your books look strong when taxpayers bail you out every time you go bankrupt, paying all your old bills and hiding all that red ink. If Citizens was a private carrier, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. Citizens comes nowhere close to having the finances to pay for a one-in-100 year storm, the standard for insurance companies. That means the bailouts are going to keep on coming. The more people like Fasano supress rates, the worse it will be.
This has been the problem with Citizens from the start. Politicians can not run an insurance company.
This is a joke.
