State approves removal of 184,500 insurance policies

Another 184,500 residential and commercial Citizens Property Insurance Corp. policies have been approved for “take-out” by private insurers as efforts continue to reduce the size of the state-run “insurer of last resort.”

The number of policies approved for removal are 181,909 personal residential policies and 2,591 commercial policies, according to a news release by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.

Private insurers selected to remove the Citizens policies are Anchor Property & Casualty (up to 20,000 policies), Heritage Property & Casualty (up to 50,000), Safepoint (up to 20,000), Southern Oak (up to 15,000), United Property & Casualty (up to 50,500) and Weston (up to 26,409).

So far this year, nearly 1.2 million policies have been approved for take-out and 141,647 have been removed from Citizens.

Under state law, customers approved for take-out will be sent a letter by the private insurer notifying them that their policy will be transferred unless the customer fills out and sends in an “opt-out” letter.

Under the take-out policy, Citizens has been reduced from about 1.5 million customers in 2012 to less than 600,000.