Michael Yaworsky was appointed Florida insurance commissioner nearly three years ago and has led the office during a time of change in Florida’s property insurance market.
The state’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. now has fewer than 400,000 policies, down from 1.4 million in 2023. Legislation passed in recent years has attracted private insurers to the Florida market by helping shield carriers from lawsuits. Yaworsky, 44, previously worked as chief of staff at the Office of Insurance Regulation and the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
The News Service of Florida has five questions for Michael Yaworsky, edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Property Insurance is a large cost for many Florida homeowners. What is the current state of Florida’s property insurance market?
Yaworsky: We are seeing good news emerge on just about every front. I think everybody knows the challenges we’ve faced, really beginning in about 2016, with just a rapid explosion of the propensity for litigation in this space.
In 2022 and 2023, the Legislature acted not to eliminate litigation in that space, but to really just restore rationality. We want to view litigation as the last resort for a consumer that is having trouble with their claim, not the first option.
That’s because when you have that, it adds costs to all of us. Florida is always going to be a bit more challenging to insure. We’ve built this beautiful paradise on a peninsula between two bodies of water that love to throw storms our way. So, we are always going to have that additional cost, in what it takes to replace the value of those homes, because catastrophes are a bit more likely here.
That just really means that we’ve got to have an efficient system overall. We’ve got to have insurers that are providing coverage and fulfilling their promises, and we’ve got to make sure we minimize waste, fraud and abuse in the system.
That’s what we’ve been working on, and we are seeing that success. Last year, Florida had the lowest rate increases in the country, at about 1%. Compare that with Nebraska, which was well into the 20s and 30s.
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All over the country, we saw this rapid expansion of the cost of insurance. We didn’t have that last year.
As much as it may have felt like that, because of the years preceding, we didn’t have that experience. Over the course of this year and next year, we’ll continue to see that trend.
As long as the Legislature doesn’t do anything too exciting or we don’t have any systemic changes in the system, we should see continued stabilization and decreases for consumers.
Q: Many people say their rates are not decreasing, even as more private companies enter the market. In what ways do Floridians actually feel the market is improving?
Yaworsky: It’s a question I get quite often, of, “I’m seeing the stabilization, but I’m not seeing the decreases yet.” There are a couple of things that go into that. There are terms that we use interchangeably, and I can even be guilty of this from time to time, and that’s rate versus premium.
The rate is the thing the state has the power over. It sets the rate. Premium is the cumulative to that.
Another way to look at it is that the state is setting how much it costs per brick of insurance that you need to replace your home. Premium is that number, multiplied by how many bricks you would need to replace your home. There is a difference.
Premium is affected directly by inflation and the cost to replace your home, much more than the rate.
To give you an example of how that’s impacted things, the total value of our insured marketplace in Florida went up between 38 and 50% between 2020 and 2024.
That was the massive cost of inflation that we experienced. It’s stabilized now, but that really is why consumers aren’t seeing more.
What I would generally say to that is two things. Number one, as much as it may not feel like you’re seeing those benefits, I think you will over time, as things continue to stabilize. We are approving more and more rate decreases throughout the system, so that’s beneficial.
But second, it’s also eating away at what would have happened to the consumers’ premiums, absent that. If we hadn’t taken the actions we’ve taken, we’d have seen both rates continue to rise and also premiums continue to increase. I think the average premium statewide went up about $100 last year, in the state of Florida, compared to other states that saw pretty staggering increases.
Q: Citizens Property Insurance Corp. started 2026 with less than half the number of policies it had a year earlier. Citizens was created as an insurer of last resort but saw explosive growth starting in 2020 because of financial problems in the private market. What are the pros and cons of shrinking Citizens?
Yaworsky: When you look at Citizens, I think there have been times in our past, from a policy perspective, where it’s been a priority of the state and Legislature to depopulate Citizens at all costs.
They do that for a good reason. They don’t want that risk to be borne on consumers in Florida that buy insurance elsewhere and have nothing to do with Citizens, if there was a financial crisis at Citizens, where all of us pay, to some degree, to make it whole again.
So, you always want to keep that well managed and less volatile. So, it’s good that we are depopulating. It’s a sign of a healthy market, but not the cause of one.
We have made sure it’s not the driving force of what we are doing here.
We are creating a healthy, stable marketplace that benefits everybody. The result of that is more options for consumers, where they don’t have to go with Citizens. So, we are excited to see the depopulation take place, but that is not the goal for us.
The goal is the healthy marketplace. Going back to that unique situation where we are on a peninsula between two bodies of water, we are always going to need some sort of residual market.
Citizens has largely done a good job of being that vehicle to get us there. That statutory idea that was created has done a great job of helping those residual policies.
In 2017, when the storms started back up and we had this litigation environment that emerged, Citizens had $8 billion on hand, in surplus, to be able to rapidly grow. They grew from about 400,000 policies in a couple years to over 1.4 million policies.
We continued to have storms. We continued to have litigation. None of that triggered a need for assessments on policyholders, because they had that money built up.
So, I would recommend keeping Citizens in a place where, as it’s shrunken down to about 350,000 to 400,000 policies, that it’s able to go back into that mode that it was in between 2005 to 2014, where it just starts saving capital, so that if the state needs it again, and we have a crisis in the 2030s or 2040s, where for whatever reason, the private market isn’t as interested or able to provide insurance, people have a choice to continue to get affordable coverage.
Q: Health insurance rates are going up by double digits for many Floridians. Knowing a lot of those increases are due to federal policies, is there anything Florida can do to make coverage more affordable?
Yaworsky: We should pull the book out and look at options long-term. I wouldn’t want to do anything too hasty, but there are definitely options to make health insurance more affordable.
But we shouldn’t do a knee-jerk reaction. The reality is that this is impacting people’s lives in two ways.
It’s the premium that they’re paying, but it’s also literally the services they need to be healthy and recover.
We did some things this year that were unique to Florida, as the federal government was kind of making the decisions it was making.
As we were approving any kind of rate increase for health insurers, we also put caps on their ability to just issue dividends.
As the regulator, right now we don’t have authority over dividends for health insurers. But we did put that in any order when we approved things, where we said, “If the federal government’s actions here do not turn out to lead to the cost drivers that everyone thinks they are right now, and you wind up with a windfall as a health insurer, we are not going to let you dividend that out to your investors. We are going to put some constraints on that.”
I think that is something unique to Florida. It’s consistent with our longer-term view that we need companies to make a reasonable profit in this space, so they’ll continue to participate and provide their services.
But this is not the wild west.
You are also going to make sure consumers get a fair deal.
I think health insurance is probably due for a long, hard look.
We have really good data, nationally, over the last decade to see how the ACA (the federal Affordable Care Act) has performed.
Let’s maybe take a look where we are and see where we want to be, nationally and as a state. Is this really the most efficient system at this point?
Q: What are the Office of Insurance Regulation’s priorities for the 2026 session?
Yaworsky: Our top priority is, believe it or not, despite the successes we have had in stabilizing the property insurance marketplace and preventing those 40, 50, 60% increases that people saw over the past couple years, there are still some legislators, other people and stakeholders than want to repeal that and go back to the old system.
It’s kind of amazing and surprising to me.
I’m just a policy guy trying to make sure we have a good marketplace.
I think our priority is going to be defending that space, so we don’t go back to that place where we are almost spending billions of dollars subsidizing some bad-acting trial attorneys, at the cost of everyone.
I think that’d be detrimental policy for the state.
Beyond that, we have several initiatives.
We’ll have a bill that pushes for more transparency in what consumers are paying for and why they are paying for it, on the first page of their declaration statement, so they have an idea of where that money is going.
One of the biggest questions I get from consumers out there is, “Where does all this money go?” Is it a savings account, or is it just given to investors if there is a profit?
We want to break that out and explain a bit more to the consumer about how insurance works and help them understand where their money is going when they write that check.
You’ll see that a lot of it is going to pay claims. That’s the biggest category. You are in a risk pool with everyone else.
Most of the money that is being collected is either going to reinsurance or to pay claims. We think that is beneficial.
We are also continuing to push for improved mitigation credits.
Because Florida has the strongest building code in the country, we also require that insurers have to give you a certain discount for those credits.
We are going to be pushing to make that process much more streamlined for consumers. We’ve got legislation out there designed to do that, so it’s not a cumbersome process for consumers to make sure they are getting what they deserve.
That’s an important initiative.
We are doing some stuff in the AI (artificial intelligence) space, hopefully that the Legislature will find interesting.
It’s really designed to stay ahead, not to quash AI, but to make sure the benefits of AI are not lost on the consumer at the end of the day.
If there are efficiencies created through AI, and that’s saving insurers money through administrative costs, those savings are going down to the consumer.
Also, we’re making sure none of the existing insurance laws aren’t being violated because AI is being used.
We’ve got a lot of things out there that continue to be on our mind in this space.
The bottom line is that this is a great time, as we are recovering, to be thinking long-term about the insurance market and where Florida needs to be.
Certainly, now is a key part, but there are things we can do now to make sure we have a good marketplace going into 2030, 2040, 2050.
There is a certain reality that when you look back since Hurricane Andrew, we’ve had three insurance crises. This was the third one. It would be good for us to take the steps to make sure this was the last one.
