COLUMN: Insurance rates are too high: It's not from lawsuits

Oklahoma is once again being told that if citizens give up their legal rights, their insurance rates will go down. It isn't true, and what's happening in Oklahoma courtrooms right now shows exactly why those rights matter.

For at least six years, hundreds of Oklahoma homeowners have been fighting State Farm in bad-faith cases over denied or shortchanged hail and wind damage claims. One case, Hursh v. State Farm, alleges the company ran an internal "Hail Focus Initiative" to narrow the definition of hail damage and cut down on roof-replacement payouts, while still marketing full replacement-cost coverage. A judge ruled the Hursh family was entitled to see State Farm's internal claims-handling documents. Attorney General Gentner Drummond tried to intervene directly; in June 2026, the Oklahoma Supreme Court said he could not join that suit but could file his own, so he did, alleging a coordinated, statewide scheme to defraud policyholders.

That legal protection, the ability of a homeowner to sue for bad faith and force an insurer to open its books, is precisely what insurers have tried to restrict through legislation. Last year lawmakers considered Senate Bill 726, a bill to restrict property-insurance lawsuits, until Rep. Mark Tedford disclosed on the House floor that State Farm itself had drafted it. It was defeated 72-18. Insurers are not done trying, and similar proposals, dressed up as consumer protection, will likely return for as long as cases like Hursh keep exposing what happens when nobody can make insurers answer for their claims practices in court.

I have seen this playbook before, because I've spent my career studying it. In the mid-1970s, as Federal Insurance Administrator, I watched doctors march on Washington in their white jackets asking for a bill that would take legal rights from patients, after insurers told them lawsuits were driving up their malpractice premiums.

President Ford was under pressure to support the insurer-drafted bill, but to his credit, he asked me to lead a team to find out what was really causing the skyrocketing rates. There was no good data available, so we had insurers submit closed claims to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and required changes to annual reports so we could track the issue going forward.

Our study proved the cause was not lawsuits but the insurer's own economic cycle. Ford wisely killed the bill, though several states were duped and took away legal rights from their citizens anyway.

If lawsuits from bad lawyers really caused the crisis, why not push a bill to get bad lawyers disbarred, instead? The real reason insurers sought that legislation was not to lower rates (their profit is higher with higher rates) but to make it easier to deny or delay claims with a lower chance of getting caught.

That same data proved vital when insurers tried the same lies again in the 1980s and early 2000s. I testified in nearly every state and in Congress, stopping this playbook and even helping a few states roll back rights they had mistakenly given away.

Which brings us back to Oklahoma today. Homeowners here are struggling to get claims paid at all, and cases like Hursh are the reason we know it: homeowners still had the right to sue and force disclosure. The response from some quarters is to make that harder going forward. Ask who benefits.

The big lie is always the same: give up some of your legal rights, and your rates will go down. I have studied this question for decades with Americans for Insurance Reform, and we have never once seen rates drop because people lost legal rights.

Insurers now point to the alleged "miracle" of Florida, claiming rates dropped after that state's 2023 tort-reform law. Another pack of lies. "Bloomberg News," in an Aug. 5, 2026 article titled "Florida Chooses Insurers and Their Profits Over Homeowners," reports that Florida passed the latest in a string of tort-reform laws in 2023 and quickly declared victory. In fact, premiums soared 18% in 2025, and Insurify expects a further 2% rise this year. Florida still has by far the highest premiums in the country, at $8,292 a year, while the share of claims denied rose from 30% in 2023 to 40% in 2024, before dipping to 34% in 2025.

Give up your legal rights to insurance companies, and your rates do not go down, but your chances of ever getting a claim paid go down with them.

Oklahoma lawmakers should learn from that record before the next insurer-drafted bill arrives at the Capitol. Politicians who take rights away from constituents for nothing in return do not deserve support. A better solution: give the Oklahoma Insurance Department authority to review and approve rates before insurers can charge them.

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J. Robert Hunter served as the Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Ford and Carter, and as Texas Insurance Commissioner. He founded the National Insurance Consumer Organization, later merging it into the Consumer Federation of America, where he served as Director of Insurance for over 25 years and remains Insurance Director Emeritus. His decades of pro bono consumer advocacy have saved Americans an estimated $1 trillion.