Lara, Newsom appear bent on enriching insurance companies | Thomas Elias

From the way they're acting, it's clear Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara believe they have no choice other than caving in to insurance industry blackmail.

Or maybe it's extortion. Either way, these two supposedly strong and independent officials have been working steadily this year to enrich insurance companies.

When State Farm announced a 30 percent hike in property insurance rates, neither elected official blinked. The same when Allstate and others announced even larger rate increases.

Newsom, at least, has the grace to gripe about inflation at the same time he's helping cause it. Lara doesn't even mention the fact that astronomically higher homeowner and business property insurance premiums create burdens on individual citizens just as much as seemingly unending increases in grocery prices.

Here's the nature of the blackmail/extortion these men face: Insurance companies are steadily canceling more and more property insurance policies in known wildfire areas because, they say, the risks of writing or continuing that kind of coverage in those places are simply too high.

Never mind that they have always in the past written such policies, making strictly local price increases when risks and replacement costs rose. If they now won't write insurance, homeowners are forced to turn to the state Fair Plan, California's insurer of last resort, where rates are much higher than even the companies charge.

Newsom, who pushed unsuccessfully over the summer for a new law to greatly speed up processing rate increases, lost out when his plan went nowhere in the state Assembly and Senate.

But…not to worry, Gavin. No sooner had that proposal died than Lara proposed virtually the same thing, but as a regulation, not a law. The essence is the same. The consequences for homeowners and businesses would be the same.

Neither Newsom nor Lara needed to react to insurance company blackmail ("We'll stop writing any policies in California if we don't get our way.) by simply caving in. They could have told the companies something like this: If you don't sell property insurance here, then you won't be selling any car insurance or life insurance or coverage on luxury items, either.

That's called linkage, and California had it for earthquake insurance until the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Until then, companies that did not sell quake insurance couldn't sell other coverage in this state.

But then-Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush set a precedent for caving in to the companies. Rather than fighting back, he lobbied the Legislature to create the California Earthquake Authority, which has had the good fortune to see its reserves pile up over 30 years in which the state saw no urban quakes of magnitude above 6.0 on the Richter Scale.

The latest in Lara's series of moves aiming to placate and bring more profit to insurance companies is his attempt to bring Newsom's rate-hike speedup plan to reality via the back door.

Primarily because of public hearings aimed at letting consumer groups shed light on rate increase requests, it usually takes some months to get a premium increase through. When rate hikes have been forced through faster, with only sketchy hearings, the companies have usually gotten about 97 percent of what they ask. But with full hearings, according to the Consumer Watchdog advocacy group, that percentage has been cut by about 25 percent.

Even though the rate-making process takes about the same time with or without full hearings, Consumer Watchdog claims hearings have cut the prices paid by customers just over $6 billion over the last few years.

The group says the 1988 Proposition 103 – which also made the insurance commissioner an elected post – requires full-scale hearings. Consumer Watchdog's founder, Harvey Rosenfield, wrote that initiative.

The bottom line: While Lara says "We do not have the luxury of time" in processing rate increases, reality suggests following the full procedures its author says are required by Prop. 103. This saves consumers money while not damaging the companies. Why, then, would Lara be trying to squelch that process if he's really acting for consumers and not for the companies whose excesses he's supposed to rein in?