The Office of Insurance Regulation along with Citizens Insurance Corporation held a meeting to make the community aware of the reason as to why Citizens is raising their insurance premium rates. There are many reasons being stated. What you need to know is that policyholder’s only need to file lawsuits when, they feel they have not been indemnified properly by their insurance company. So as long as insurance companies keep underpaying and denying claims, there will be lawsuits filed against them. Also, Assignments of Benefits allow contractors to charge your insurance company directly instead of the policyholder getting the bill. There are claims that contractors in the Tri-County area are abusing this system and over charging insurance companies, who in turn blame this as their motive to increase rates. There will always be bad apples in every industry, but to say that a couple of contractors are causing the rate shifts is an attempt to deviate from the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that the people who are representing Tri-County policyholders are providing more awareness to our community of what losses should be covered. Hence, causing policyholders to claim what is rightfully entitled to them per the policy they purchased. This upsets the carriers that our largely populated counties compared to other Florida counties are submitting more claims and consequently, they are coming up with excuses to raise their rates. They used to raise their because of all the Hurricanes that were hitting South FLorida. Now that we haven’t had any Hurricanes, except Matthew in the past 12 years, they need to come up with another excuse to raise rates. Even though most homeowners have upgraded their homes to have hurricane proof windows and doors after all the Hurricanes, the insurance companies still continue to diminish their coverage and reduce policy limits, which in turn will only minimize their claims payouts.
Click Here to view the entire meeting.
To hear Senator Anitere Flores’ Presentation click the above link and scroll to 1:44.
Click Here for Oscar Mormeneo’s Speech. 1, 2, or 3