Insurance execs courted

February 1, 2007, Mark Ballard, The Advocate© (Baton Rouge, LA)

Blanco: La. might take over coverage if no new policies written

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she told top insurance executives Wednesday that unless they start selling hurricane protection policies in Louisiana, state government may take over property insurance.

“I also mentioned that the ingredients for state takeover are very plain and perhaps were being driven by their actions,” Blanco said in an interview from an airplane waiting to take off from the Palm Springs, Calif., airport for her flight home.

“If they’re abandoning us, we don’t have any choices,” Blanco said.

Blanco gave a speech in nearby La Quinta to the nation’s largest insurance trade group. It was her latest attempt to make homeowners’ property insurance more available and more affordable in post-hurricane Louisiana.

She and Commissioner of Insurance Jim Donelon spent four days this week in California trying to persuade more insurers to write policies in Louisiana.

Blanco said most of her speech reminded the insurance executives of the efforts Louisiana has made to lower the risk of damage from hurricanes.

For instance, Blanco said, she told members of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America that new flood-protection projects and tougher building codes have made coastal Louisiana better able to withstand hurricanes.

Insurance companies, by and large, have stopped selling policies that pay to repair hurricane damage to homes and buildings in the southern part of the state.

“I told them we want them to come in and fill the voids, or else state government is going to do something like what Florida has done,” Blanco said.

The Florida Legislature last week approved changes to the way property insurance is bought and sold in that state. The new laws lowered premiums for property insurance by, for instance, letting that state’s insurer of last resort compete against private insurance companies.

The insurance industry has loudly criticized the Florida changes.

Blanco said the insurance executives told her that they fear other states might follow Florida’s lead. She responded to them that she prefers state government not get involved in selling insurance, she said.

“The private market is best,” Blanco said.

But property owners are not in the mood for the industry’s proposals that would make it easier for them to sell insurance in Louisiana and other Gulf Coast states, she said.

“If you underpay a claimant who has been paying their premiums for all these many years — if you then, upon renewal, either double or triple their rates or you tell them you’re not going to cover them anymore, then you’ve set up a vacuum,” Blanco said.

“It does not create a friendly environment for the marketplace,” she said.

Commissioner Jim Donelon, on the same returning plane as Blanco, said he and the governor asked insurance executives for a dozen of the companies to come to the state and sell hurricane protection policies.

Officials with five companies have spoken to him about coming to Louisiana to write hurricane insurance.

“No assurances yet, but (there are) positive indications,” said Donelon, who next week travels to London to lobby the sellers of surplus lines that insurance companies buy to protect them from having to pay out too much.

The 1,000 members of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America are companies that, combined, write about 41 percent of the country’s homeowners’ insurance policies.

Blanco met Monday and Tuesday with executives of the companies that create “modeling” software used by insurance companies to figure out how risky it is to write policies along Louisiana’s coastline.