Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Maxine Joselow and Vanessa Montalbano). Here’s an excerpt:
In California, State Farm and Allstaterecently stopped selling new home insurance policies after years of catastrophic wildfires. In Louisiana, at least seven insurance companies have failed since Hurricane Ida. And in Florida, most big insurance companies have already pulled out of the storm-battered state.
In these disaster-prone states, the climate crisis is fueling an insurance crisis, leaving homeowners struggling to find affordable coverage. Yet policymakers have few easy fixes at their fingertips.
“None of the solutions here are easy,” said Benjamin Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who has studied the effects of climate-change-fueled disasters on insurance markets.
A new federal report, released today by the Treasury Department’s Federal Insurance Office, reinforces this conclusion. While it offers 20 recommendations for state insurance regulators, it acknowledges that the Biden administration has limited authority to compel these changes, a Treasury official said on a call with reporters yesterday. If you’re a homeowner in California, Florida or another disaster-prone state, you may be wondering: What can policymakers do to make it easier — and cheaper — for folks to get insurance?