Courtesy of Pam Martens
On February 24, President Joe Biden renewed the 2020 Presidential Proclamation, making it clear that the National Emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic is still in effect. Most Americans don’t expect to become the victims of state-sanctioned price gouging during a National Emergency. But across Florida, struggling families and senior citizens are opening their homeowners’ insurance renewal notices to learn that their policy will now cost them $800 to $1200 more than it did last year.
Rates are going up by 30 to 40 percent in many cases – during a National Emergency. Making the outrage among residents more palpable is the fact that a hurricane didn’t even touch down in Florida in 2020.
A three bedroom/two bath cement block home with a tile roof is costing anywhere from $2800 to more than $3000 to insure in South Florida. In the three most southern counties on the East Coast of Florida (Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade) homes located inland can cost over $6,000 to ensure with nose-bleed increases occurring for waterfront homes.
Florida insurance companies (some of which are paying multi-million dollar salaries to their CEOs and paying out tens of millions of dollars each year in stock buybacks and cash dividends to benefit their shareholders), have succeeded in convincing the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation that they deserve the rate hikes because they are the victims of frivolous lawsuits by unconscionable lawyers; they are experiencing financial hardship for claims still being paid for Hurricane Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018; and that their reinsurance costs have risen.
One Florida State legislator who’s not buying the spin that the insurers are successfully selling to state regulators is Florida State Senator Gary Farmer. Farmer was quoted by Dennis Bailey, a former Circuit Judge and now head of the Trial division at the Merlin Law Group, as follows:
“They hide their profits. They pay them to sister and related companies…The insurers are just cooking the books and coming here and crying poverty to us and everything is being done on the backs of homeowners.”
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