this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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The thing about insurance companies is they are out to make money. They don't care about philosophy or the blowing of the political winds. So for them to pull out of Florida they must have analyses that show that pulling out will make them more money than staying in the market. It doesn't matter if there are people there who need insurance, Farmers is out to make money not give it away in a bad investment.
The problem is we allow them to subdivide the nation in their policies. The risk in Florida isn't shared across the nation, which would mitigate this issue.
So we should instead punish everyone else for not living in a documented flood plane?
You're not being punished in that scenario. You're in a larger pool which lowers risk. Lower risk means lower premiums. It's one of the principles that makes socialized medicine in countries all over the world cheaper than the US healthcare system.
Lower premiums for Florida. Higher premiums for everyone else.
Risk pooling doesn’t work the way you think.
My rates would go up because of someone else's choices. Not interested, sorry.
I'm living in Wyoming at over a mile of elevation. What is my incentive to "share the risk" by paying higher insurance rates so that some asshole in Florida can keep their beach condo??? Same with the red nose and clown shoe wearing bozos that keep building homes in the fire prone areas of California.
If you can't afford insurance and you can't afford to rebuild then you can't afford to live there. It's that simple.
Like I said in other responses, being in the larger pool reduces your risk. They can still charge FLA residences for being in a higher risk zone. But pulling from a nationwide pool makes sure they can cover when a storm the size of the whole state swoops in and creates damage over such a large area. Isolating Florida just makes it impossible to cover. You would actually benefit by being in the larger pool. The more they isolate you, the higher the risk of the pool, which means premiums increase. This exact thing happened at my workplace when the insurance company created "healthy" and "unhealthy" pool. Premiums for both pools shot up. Everyone was better off all being in the larger pool, yes even with the "unhealthy" people in the pool. Same thing applies here.
It doesn't reduce the risk, it merely shares the cost across more people. You also don't seem to be aware that the Federal Government is already subsidizing Flood Insurance in Florida through the NFIP which is administered by FEMA. The people living there are already benefiting from distributed cost via direct contributions from Federal Tax money.
But that's the way insurance tends to work - actuaries look at the risk involved in ensuring person X or group X against threat Y and charge accordingly.
Larger pool, lower risk. That's one of the basics in actuary tables.
That's now how it works. Adding a high-risk pool to a low-risk pool doesn't lower the overall risk. It averages it. Meaning the lower-risk pool has their costs increased, and the higher-risk pool has their costs decreased. Since the high-risk pool is much smaller than the low-risk pool, merging them is a negative for a larger population.