State insurance commissioner candidates clash over how to fix the system

Two Democrats, Ben Allen and Jane Kim, are both running for California insurance commissioner, a job that has become especially high-profile since the Los Angeles area wildfires in January 2025 created a rift in the homeowners insurance system.

The Southern California News Group asked the candidates vying to represent you several questions in order to help you get to know them better. This story is based on their responses. You can find the full questionnaires from these and other candidates on your ballot — as well as helpful tips on how to vote, explainers on the multitude of propositions and more — on our Voter Guide here.

The next insurance commissioner will inherit a range of political problems, including industry demands to raise premiums amid rising wildfire risk and maintaining distance from insurers accused of getting too cozy with the current commissioner. The winning candidate will be faced with addressing the state’s overburdened Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan.

In May, the FAIR Plan got the green light to raise rates 29.1% for certain homeowners starting Oct. 15 — just weeks before the Nov. 3 general election ballot.

We asked both candidates about State Farm litigation, whether insurance executive pay should be capped and more in our Southern California News Group’s 2026 Voter Guide. Both candidates want to lower rates, reduce wildfire risks and improve the FAIR Plan. Their similarities end there.

Here’s a look at the candidates and what they said about their platforms.

Kim, the populist

The 49-year-old Kim said she wants to stop the growth of the FAIR Plan, which acts as a backstop for homeowners who can’t get insurance elsewhere due to fire zones in which they live, or have filed claims too high for their private insurer to absorb.

She wants to replace the current multipayer, private home insurance market and the FAIR Plan with a centralized, state-managed system to cover wildfire and flood risks.

The proposed single-payer, state-run “universal disaster insurance for all” would make coverage automatic and universal, with everyone in the same risk pool and premiums based on property cost and risk.

By pooling premiums into a public system, she argues the state can directly fund home-hardening (using fire-resistant building materials), community fireproofing with low interest loans or tax credits, more fuel management (clearing or cutting back vegetation and brush around homes) and community resilience (evaluating neighborhood-level risks rather than just individual properties, by upgrading drainage or building codes).

“Ultimately, the FAIR Plan should be shrinking, not growing. But this will only happen if communities are safer and insurers compete to write that business again.” said Kim. “I’d require surplus profits to be reinvested in making homes and communities safer.

Kim supports capping insurance executive pay, arguing the current insurance market pads executive pay while leaving families stranded when disasters strike.

Kim was formerly the California political director and national political director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. The populist isn’t running publicly on the back of the senator’s Democratic Socialist viewpoints — though the movement is experiencing a political surge bolstered by the groundwork laid by the politician in cities like Denver, New York, Seattle and Los Angeles.

She said that Ben Allen has not proposed a plan to reform the FAIR Plan at the scale needed in the state.

“Perhaps because he’s afraid to stand up to the utility and insurance industries,” Kim noted in her Voter Guide questionnaire. “Many Californians have already hardened roofs, cleared brush, and retrofitted their homes. But the benefits have largely flowed to insurers as avoided claims, not back to homeowners as lower premiums or higher discounts. A public, nonprofit program would use our premium dollars to mitigate risk at the scale we need, rather than using premiums to fund shareholder payouts, private jets, and CEO bonuses.”

Allen, the lawmaker

The 48-year-old Allen wants to bring his legislative expertise to “reduce risk” and depopulate the FAIR Plan.

“I believe the better approach is to fix the market we have,” Allen said in comments made in his Voter Guide questionnaire.

Unlike Kim, Allen opposes capping executive pay. He wants to ensure “excessive executive pay is not being passed on to consumers and that insurers cannot plead financial hardship while rewarding executives at levels that are inconsistent with those claims.”

Allen, who represents parts of Santa Monica and Los Angeles that were badly damaged in last year’s wildfires, wants the state to reduce risk by investing in wildfire mitigation and help reduce the need for pricier insurance coverage through the FAIR Plan. He says the policy of bringing more insurers to the table also will eventually depopulate the FAIR Plan.

In his dozen years in the Legislature, Allen carved out a reputation focused on environmental protection — including reducing plastic pollution, safe drinking water, wildfire prevention, drought preparedness and clean air.

Since last year’s L.A. fires, Allen has been knee-deep in authoring legislation to improve the state’s insurance marketplace, including consumer protections, wildfire catastrophe, oversight and accountability and ways to prevent sudden coverage drops.

Allen wants to lower insurance costs by working on policies with the state legislature to update building codes to require more fire-resistant materials, revise land-use policies to minimize building in flammable areas near wildlands, and disincentivize oil companies from exacerbating climate change.

He said in the Voter Guide that Kim’s FAIR plan reform would be “bad for individual policyholders.”

“Reducing reliance on the FAIR Plan and restoring a functional private insurance market must be the central goal of the department of insurance,” he said.

“The reality is that a comprehensive single-payer home insurance plan would not function the way a single-payer health insurance plan could; it would be regressive, forcing taxpayers (including renters) to subsidize homeowners in high-risk areas,” he said. “The program would let insurance companies off the hook, keeping the surplus of profits they’ve generated from premiums Californians have been paying for decades, and putting all the escalating risk onto the state.”

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