No minimum policy requirement

The provision contained no requirement that companies selling auto insurance write a minimum number of homeowner policies, said Mike Fasano, a former legislator from the Tampa Bay area who later tried unsuccessfully to strengthen the law to one that required insurers to sell everything in Florida that they sell elsewhere in the country.

The provision that was enacted “doesn’t say how many policies they have to write,” Fasano said in a recent interview. “It allowed them to say, ‘OK, we’re writing 10 policies in Hardee County. Therefore we’re writing both.’ It definitely was watered down. It should have said, ‘If you write 1,000 auto policies, then you should write 1,000 homeowner insurance policies.’ ”

That’s closer to a suggestion by Hollywood resident Pat Crowdery in a May 2021 email to the South Florida Sun Sentinel addressing insurer pullouts and rising rates. “If our state government did its job, they could pass legislation that would require any company that wants to write auto policies in the state to also take a certain percentage of homeowner policies.”

She noted that the idea might be complicated to implement “but doable.” The big national companies “all spend lots of advertising dollars trying to lure consumers into purchasing an auto policy from them while they shirk their responsibilities to the state by not offering home policies to those same consumers,” she said. “It’s immoral to put this current crisis on the middle class.”

Fasano lamented that the legislature “never came down on these insurance companies long ago, especially the big boys.” He sympathizes with consumers “who see the State Farms and the Allstates reporting billions in profits each year while their rates go up because their companies in Florida are crying poor mouth. You think, ‘What is the state doing for these consumers?’ ”