Ryan Bourne
Ryan Bourne and Sophia Bagley
California’s wildfire crisis isn’t just a natural disaster; it’s also a policy failure.
In recent years, state price control regulations have driven private home insurance providers like State Farm and Allstate out of offering new products in the state and led to the nonrenewal of thousands of existing home insurance policies. This has left many homeowners exposed to catastrophic financial losses from the recent wildfires and created a huge strain on the state-run Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plan, the insurer of last resort.
California’s price controls, whereby regulators must approve proposed premium increases, require insurers to submit detailed justifications for their rate increases to the California Department of Insurance (CDI). Crucially, those companies have until recently had to demonstrate that proposed premiums are based on historic losses, not analysis based on forward-looking risk assessments.
Designed to keep insurance premiums affordable, through rates that are never “excessive, inadequate, [or] unfairly discriminatory,” these regulations—introduced through Proposition 103—led to rules preventing companies from recalibrating prices to fully reflect what they believed were higher future wildfire risks after 2017.
The CDI rejected or delayed approval for substantial rate increases in many cases, creating a de facto price cap. Previous research from scholars at the International Center for Law and Economics shows that the average delay was 293 days between 2020 and 2022—a significant worsening from the average of 157 days between 2013 and 2019.
In fact, between 2017 and 2022, California was the worst state in the country for “rate suppression,” having the biggest gap between “the actuarially indicated rate and the rate approved by regulators.”
Firms weren’t just unable to reprice to reflect the new perceived risk of wildfires. California’s laws also limited insurers’ ability to reflect their own reinsurance costs into rates. Reinsurance, essential for shielding insurers from catastrophic events, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/california-insurance-market-another-victim-war-prices