When Will Floridians See a Drop in Property Insurance Rates?

By  //  August 9, 2013

ABOVE VIDEO: Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater guides a tour of the Florida State Capitol building in Tallahassee.

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA – Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater is asking Insurance Regulation Commissioner Kevin McCarty why property insurance rates have yet to decrease for Floridians, despite the fact that catastrophic pricing has decreased by as much as 20 percent.

In Atwater’s weekly e-newsletter, he included a copy of the letter he sent McCarty earlier this week. Atwater’s e-newsletter and his newsletter to McCarty are posted below.

Dear Fellow Floridian:

Jeff Atwater
Jeff Atwater

For more than a decade, the insurance industry has argued that increasing property insurance rates have been due to the increasing cost of reinsurance, which is what insurers use to transfer portions of their risk to other parties. But recently, it is has been reported by reinsurance professionals and analytics firms that catastrophe reinsurance pricing has decreased by as much as 20 percent. It only makes sense that if insurance companies raised their rates on Florida families because the reinsurance market drove their costs up, they should be able to lower the cost of insurance for Florida families now that reinsurance prices have fallen. So this week, I sent a letter to the Office of Insurance Regulation Commissioner Kevin McCarty asking for an explanation as to why rates have not come down. Floridians deserve to know when they can begin seeing savings in their insurance bills.

Jeff Atwater Jeff Atwater Chief Financial Officer State of Florida atwater-letter-insurance-commissioner