New rules for insurance company owners that are now out of state regulators’ reach. An emergency relief fund to help low-income homeowners pay for insurance. A national risk pool to spread insurance costs across several states.
Those are some of the ideas — some new, some brought back — that Florida’s Democratic senators are pushing to ease the high costs of property insurance costs for homeowners and renters in the state.
Only 11 of 40 state Senate seats are currently held by Democrats. On Wednesday, nine of the 11 senators held a news conference in Tallahassee to outline bills that each are sponsoring or plan to sponsor during the next legislative session that’s scheduled to begin on Jan. 13.
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Sen. Lori Berman, the party’s minority leader from southern Palm Beach County, said the list represented the first part of the party’s “affordability agenda.”
“Over the last decade, as property insurance costs have skyrocketed, the average cost of rent has nearly doubled,” Berman said. “Nearly one million households in Florida are struggling to afford their housing costs and nearly 40% of those households are seniors.”
Berman said she is sponsoring a bill, SB 84, that would create an Insurance Solutions Advisory Council to “bring together stakeholders to make recommendations on how to lower rates.”
The bill, sponsored by Berman but not advanced in the 2024 and 2025 sessions, would be similar to a 2008 plan that led to successful measures, she said. The council would develop an annual report and submit suggestions to the governor and Legislature.
Sen. Barbara Sharief, who represents western Broward County, says her bill, SB 30, would empower the state’s insurance consumer advocate the power to issue subpoenas, compel testimony, and request formal hearings when insurers propose “unreasonable” rate hikes. She said her bill would also prohibit the Florida Office of Insurance Regulators from approving any rate hike above 10% and caps cumulative increases at 15% over 12 months.
Sen. Rosalind Osgood, representing part of eastern Broward County, is sponsoring SB 78 that would exempt home-hardening features such as impact-resistant doors, garage doors and windows from sales taxes. A two-year exemption on those materials expired in June 2024.
Homes that install windstorm-mitigation features typically see discounts off of their insurance premiums.
Sen. Tina Polsky, who works as a mediator while representing the eastern area near the borders of Palm Beach and Broward counties, filed a bill, SB 108, that would require policyholders and insurers with claims disputes to attend mediation prior to litigating. Current law establishes mediation as a voluntary alternative.
“Mediation will help alleviate high legal fees and court costs,” Polsky said. “It will result in faster resolutions. It preserves reputations, privacy, and peace. It improves communication. Even on those cases that don’t settle, there’s a conversation to be had between the insured and the carrier.”
Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, representing northeastern Orange County, filed SB 128 that would require insurers to notify policyholders of their rights to demand inspections of roofs 15 years old and older when the insurer plans to cancel policies based on the roof’s age. If the inspection shows that the roof has five or more years left, the insurer must pay for the inspection.
Sen. Darryl Rouson, whose district straddles Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, is sponsoring SB 140, which would extend whistleblower protections to employees and contractors of insurers who “expose illegal and unethical activities by insurance companies.”
Sen. Tracie Davis, from Duval County, is resurrecting a bill she filed last year that would establish a $500 million emergency trust fund to assist homeowners who can demonstrate financial need or an inability to pay their insurance bills due to rate increases.
Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith proposes tighter regulation of Managing General Agents, which are parent companies of insurers that a draft report released earlier this year alleged shifted profits from underwriters to back-room operations and investors while claiming the insurers were close to bankruptcy. Smith said his bill would include a 20% cap on the percentage of premiums that MGAs could charge insurers for services performed, and prohibit insurers who claim to experience financial challenges from paying dividends and executive bonuses.
“These critical reforms will bring much needed transparency and accountability to corporations and it will lower costs for policyholders,” Smith said.
Sen. Mack Bernard, who represents part of eastern Palm Beach County, says he plans to propose establishing a National Catastrophe Risk Pool that would spread insurance premiums across multiple states. He did not say how he plans to accomplish such a task without involving Congress and the United States president.
The senators have a tough road ahead. In recent years, lawmakers in the Republican majority have held the votes to dictate terms of insurance industry reforms. Most notable were bills in 2022 and 2023 that cut off policyholders’ access to generous legal fees. Insurers and their allies contended that the access encouraged frivolous claims and lawsuits that threatened to bankrupt the industry.
Critics, including many Democrats, countered that the reforms have emboldened insurers to continue to raise costs while denying more claims.
During this year’s session, legislators failed to enact a long list of reform proposals, including some that would have restored access to legal fees, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis and industry leaders who warned against doing anything that would impede the industry’s return to profitability.
Democratic senators did not mention legal fee reforms among the list of bills presented on Wednesday, but of course that doesn’t preclude such bills from being introduced later by Democratic or Republican legislators prior to the beginning of the session.
Appearing at a conference of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association in Orlando on Monday, DeSantis criticized House Republicans who supported changes during the last session and predicted they won’t do it again this year, according to a report by Politico.
Reached on Wednesday after the Democratic senators released their proposals, Michael Carlson, president and CEO of the Personal Insurance Federation of Florida, an industry-funded lobbying group, reached a similar conclusion.
“We believe that the Legislature should stay the course and permit the legal reforms passed in 2022 and 2023 to be fully implemented,” Carlson told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “As the result of these reforms, property rate trends are in the right direction, lawsuit numbers are falling, and new companies are entering the market, giving consumers more choices and increasing competition.”
The Office of Insurance Regulation, he added, “has ample authority to enforce all applicable consumer protection laws in order to ensure that consumers are treated fairly.”
Ron Hurtibise covers business and consumer issues for the South Florida Sun Sentinel. He can be reached by phone at 954-356-4071 or by email at rhurtibise@sunsentinel.com.
