Florida’s Hurricane Insurance Crisis Reaching New Levels

• Citizens Property Insurance on the path to becoming number one insurer in Florida.
• The Florida Legislature has sided with insurance companies and allowed them to raise premium rates up to 5 percent automatically, without state oversight.
• Florida’s homeowners continue to face hundreds of dollars in assessments to cover Citizens Property Insurance deficits. This is in addition to the escalating cost of insurance premiums homeowners continue to face.
• State Farm, Florida’s largest insurer has requested premium rate increases by an average of 70 percent statewide. South Florida may witness even more drastic increases with Miami-Dade residents potentially experiencing a 142 percent rate increase, 130 percent in Broward and 127 percent for Palm Beach.
• Allstate Floridian, currently serving 650,000 policyholders recently announced it is dropping 174,000 of them, including 17,000 in the Tampa Bay area.
• The state Office of Insurance Regulation announced Atlantic Preferred, Florida Preferred and Southern Family, all part of Tampa-based Poe Financial group will face liquidation and insolvency.
• Allstate announced July 12, 2006 they were dropping an additional 120,000 homeowners policies in Florida.
• State Farm announced it was seeking higher insurance rate increases from the Office of Insurance Regulation.
• Business owners in South Florida are unable to find coverage to protect their businesses. Worse, the state offers no “insurer of last resort” as they do for homeowners, leaving hundreds of businesses owners vulnerable during the 2006 hurricane season.