Maxwell: Florida’s insurance mess — big salaries, missing flood insurance, underfunded companies

Scott Maxwell, Orlando SentinelOrlando Sentinel

Two years ago, with insurance rates skyrocketing, Florida legislators called a special session, vowing to provide relief.

And they did provide help … to the insurance companies. Homeowners, however, watched their premiums continue to rise for nine consecutive quarters.

Most of you aren’t stupid. You know you’re still paying through the nose. And that you don’t have many choices.

So to distract you, GOP lawmakers have spent the past two years screaming about everything except insurance. Immigrants. Democratic prosecutors. Rainbow-colored crosswalks.

Pay no attention to the fact that some Floridians can barely afford to stay in their own homes. The politicians want you angry about chalk drawings.

Well, while the politicians were busy trying to gin up outrage, a handful of Florida journalists kept their eyes on the insurance issues and discovered some disturbing things.

One is that the executives at Slide — a company that the state has forced tens of thousands of Floridians to use — is paying its executives as much as $21 million a year. (In a state where insurance lobbyists and their puppet politicians claim the poor insurance companies can barely make ends meet.)

Another is that a staggering number of Floridians are bypassing flood insurance — in one of the most flood-prone states in America.

And perhaps the most disturbing discovery: Seven companies operating in Florida were recently flagged for potentially not having the resources to pay all their customers’ claims if catastrophic storms hit. Is yours one of them? Who knows. The state’s insurance division refuses to release that information, choosing to protect the companies over consumers.

Slide salaries

We’ll start with Slide, the relatively new company that has funneled big donations to Republican politicians in Florida and to which the state has funneled many customers as the state-run Citizens Property Insurance program tried to shed policies.

Florida homeowners become Slide customers — whether they want to or not | Commentary

Last week a CBS affiliate in South Florida ran a piece on a man who said his rates went from $3,800 with one company to $8,300 with Slide, which then tried to raised his annual premiums to $26,047 after that.

If those numbers weren’t shocking enough, Slide’s most recent SEC filings revealed that the husband-and-wife team that runs the company, Bruce and Sharon Lucas, had compensation packages worth a combined $50 million over the last two years.

If this was a totally free market, that’d be one thing. But the state foisted more than 200,000 customers from Citizens insurance to Slide to help pad the Lucases’ pockets.

The homeowner in that CBS story ultimately found another company. CEO Bruce Lucas didn’t answer questions about his compensation package with a company spokesman saying, “It is the company’s policy not to discuss compensation or other internal matters.”

If I were them, I probably wouldn’t want to discuss it either.

Missing flood coverage

Then there’s flood insurance. Florida is one of the most flood-prone states in America. Yet only about 20% of Floridians have flood insurance. In Central Florida, it’s only 6%, as the Sentinel recently reported.

With storms getting stronger, only 6 percent of Central Floridians have flood insurance

Most people don’t get flood insurance for one of two reasons: They assume their standard homeowner’s policy covers flood damage. (It doesn’t.) Or they assume they’re not at risk.

That second part can be a devastatingly faulty assumption in a flat state that’s surrounded by water and subjected to frequent storms. In fact, the Florida office of Financial Services put out a report entitled: “Anywhere it rains, it can flood” and noted that “more than 40% of flood claims submitted to the [National Flood Insurance Program] are from outside of high-risk flood areas.”

In an ideal world, home insurance would insure your home against any disaster, whether it’s wind, fire, flood or Godzilla stomping through your neighborhood. But it doesn’t.

And with more and more Floridians skipping out on flood insurance — sometimes because they can barely afford their basic insurance — it’s a recipe for potential disaster.

Failing financials

Lastly, there’s the troubling news about the number of companies the state found unprepared to cover all of its claims should major disasters strike.

Each year, the state runs “catastrophe stress tests.” And in the old days, every company passed.

In the latest report, however, seven failed. And the state won’t say which seven. The Palm Beach Post detailed this mess in its piece: “Is your insurance company being monitored for financial soundness? Why you can’t find out.”

Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation said in its “Property Insurance Stability Report” that, after it alerted the companies that failed the stress tests, they all made fixes, such as “One insurer’s parent is willing to loan funding if needed …”

Maybe that’s good enough for you. But I think most policyholders would like the full story.

And the part of this story that I found most outrageous when I started digging deeper is that the state won’t even say whether any of the red-flagged companies are the same companies onto which Citizens has been off-loading customers.

In a statement, Slide said it passed all its stress tests with flying colors. But if you’d like to see the records for yourself, too bad. “This information is confidential,” said a spokeswoman for the state’s insurance office.

Home insurance costs in Florida spiked in third quarter. Are more increases on the way?

Listen, there have been some bright spots. The state has seen more insurers enter the market in recent years and some small rate dips in recent months.

But rates are still way higher than when “relief” was promised. Meanwhile some insurance execs are cashing in. And you can’t even find out if your own company was deemed financially unsound earlier this year.

But sure, tell us again about how we should really be worked up about multi-colored crosswalks.