Martin Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings, said Florida insurers have engaged in “delay, deny and defend” practices.
Florida’s property insurance companies last year denied policyholders’ damage claims more aggressively than in the past, leading a greater share of them to file lawsuits despite multiple tort reform measures passed in recent years.
That’s the conclusion of an independent insurer ratings agency in a news release published on Sept. 5. The Weiss Ratings report, which is based on data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, contrasts with recent data from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR), which reported at the end of August that insurance rates are trending downward and 15 new property and casualty insurers have entered the Florida market since the passage of the major legislative reforms.
The OIR’s Property Insurance Stability Report published on July 1 also concludes that the average total defense cost and containment (DCC) expenses per claim have declined from $992.89 in 2022 to $817.64 in 2024.
“Industry experts agree that Florida’s market is the healthiest it has been in nearly a decade,” Shiloh Elliott, the OIR’s press secretary, told the Florida Record in an email. “Rates are on the decline; as of Aug. 30 the OIR has received 57 filings for rate decreases and 82 filings for 0% rate increases, with one of the largest insurers in the state (Florida Peninsula) requesting its largest rate decrease in recent memory.”
But the Weiss Ratings report highlights two facts that it says weigh heavily on the state’s property insurance trends: In the wake of two hurricanes that struck Florida last year, property insurers denied damage payments to 47% of affected homeowners, a 17% increase over two years earlier.
And also in 2024, lawsuits as a share of claims closed with no payments stood at 12.9%, a rise of 4% over the 2022 figures. Weiss Ratings chose those years to better show the impact of new laws restricting the ability to file lawsuits.
“This is one of the most shocking trends I’ve seen in my 54 years tracking the industry,” Dr. Martin Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings, said in a prepared statement. “In 2022, the state of Florida succumbed to the insurance lobby, enacting new laws governing lawsuits. And these new laws, called ‘tort reform,’ were widely expected to make it much harder for consumers to sue. But rather than passively accepting claims denials, homeowners went to court even more often.”
According to OIR’s interactions with Weiss since last year, however, he has a tendency to raise alarms when underlying conditions do not call for them. Weiss said at that time that Florida’s insurance market was on verge of collapse.
“Because the OIR takes consumer safety very seriously, his statement prompted Deputy Commissioner Sheryl Parker to subpoena Dr. Weiss and his agency for evidence of such collapse, to which subpar exhibits were provided and nothing further was discussed, and no such collapse has taken place,” Elliott said.
The most recent Weiss report says that policyholders filed 124 lawsuits against insurers for every thousand claims and that lawsuit filing rose to 129 per thousand claims in 2024, after the tort reforms took effect.
“... I wouldn’t be surprised if many insurers in the state pursued a deliberate strategy to deny claims more aggressively, thinking that tort reform would protect them and expecting it would sharply reduce the number of policyholder lawsuits,” Weiss said. “It looks like they were wrong. Tort reform failed, and their strategy backfired.”
