Elephants in the Room: Big Problems in Florida's Insurance Markets that Nobody Wants to Discuss

This PowerPoint report was presented at the Governor’s Hurricane Conference by Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute. Slides illustrate that Florida is America’s top catastrophe problem and that the state’s huge exposure will only grow larger in the future, despite the current real estate collapse. Florida is not the nation’s most uninsurable property insurance market, but it is the most dysfunctional. The source of this dysfunctionality, however, is not hurricanes but rate suppression and a hostile regulatory environment, which is ultimately anti-consumer. A slide shows that in 2007 (latest data available) total insured coastal exposure in Florida was $2.459 trillion, an increase of $522 billion, or 27 percent, from 2004. Other slides shows that average homeowners insurance premiums at the end of the year 2009 were $1,641, down 14 percent from March 2007, and that from 2007 to 2009 claim frequency and severity rose by 26.8 percent and 32.5 percent, respectively. Sources include AIR Worldwide and Security First Insurance.