Floridians not happy with insurance

State’s consumers are the least satisfied in U.S., survey says

Wah. Floridians no like insurance. Insurance expensive and mean. Floridians no like storms. Floridians really no like high cost of insurance because of storms. Floridians also no like no-name insurance companies that replaced well-known insurance companies that fled the state because of storms. Wah. That’s the takeaway from an analysis of consumers’ attitudes toward their insurance coverage gleaned from more than 105,000 reviews posted on Clearsurance, an independent insurance reviews and rankings site. The survey found that Floridians are the least happy homeowner insurance customers in the country.

While consumers nationwide gave their insurers an overall average score of 4.27, Florida consumers rated their insurers 4.03. Worse, if the company is “Floridafocused,” ratings averaged 3.57.

Of course, an optimist would accuse Clearsurance of taking a glass-half-empty view of this. Or is it a glass-one-fifth-empty? The highest allowable consumer rating is 5, so maybe a score above 4, or even above 3.5, isn’t really that bad.

Clearsurance offered several possible explanations for Floridians’ relative unhappiness.

Florida customers are less likely

to be insured by a wellknown, heavily advertised, brandname company such as State Farm or Allstate, because those companies largely stopped writing new business in the state over the years we became intimate with the names Andrew, Wilma, Frances, Jeanne and Charley.

A higher percentage of reviews

by policyholders of Floridafocused companies — 8 percent — described a claims dispute compared with 1.5 percent of reviews of national companies.

More customers of Floridafocused companies

— 17.5 percent — mentioned hurricanes compared with Florida customers of national companies, 6.5 percent. (Perhaps that’s because Florida-focused companies are the only insurance choices for many of us living in hurricane-vulnerable areas vacated by the national companies.)

for Florida insurance consumers than for homeowners elsewhere in the nation.

Rates are climbing faster Floridians are also more likely

to misunderstand what their policies cover. Seven percent of Floridians reported a coverage misunderstanding compared with 2 percent nationwide.

Clearsurance recommends that everyone review their policies to learn what’s covered. After last year’s hurricanes, 42 percent of survey participants nationwide said they hadn’t taken steps to check their coverage.