Northwest Florida Daily News
Editorial
July 22, 2011
Naples entrepreneur Jim Malone, board chairman of Citizens Property Insurance, is floating a suggestion to privatize Florida’s state-backed “insurer of last resort” by selling all or part of it to commercial interests — “the private world,” as he put it. But he knows it won’t be easy.
“There will be a hundred reasons people will come up with not to do it, I’m sure,” he said the other day.
A hundred? Try 1.4 million. According to The Associated Press, that’s how many policies Citizens Property has in force. And it’s probably how many policies will suddenly become more expensive if private firms take them over.
Citizens Property’s policies are widely considered to be underpriced. (That may help explain why it’s adding about 5,000 new policies every week.) What’s more, if a major hurricane were to empty the company’s coffers, Florida taxpayers would be forced to bail it out.
Private companies don’t work that way.
Neither, in our view, should the government.
Privatizing Florida’s biggest insurer of homes and businesses would be painful for some policyholders — about 1.4 million, we’d guess — but it would get state government out of the insurance business, relieve the state of a huge potential liability, take taxpayers off the hook and maybe, just maybe, increase competition among private-sector insurers and eventually bring down insurance costs for everyone.
It’s an idea worth considering, and Gov. Rick Scott is reported to be doing just that. “I want to look at it very closely,” he said.
Floridians who pay for property insurance ought to look at these events closely, too.
http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articles/entrepreneur-42062-resort-malone.html
