Todd Michaels: Florida’s insurance reality check

Businessman holding and giving insurance and assurance icon including family health real estate car and financial for risk management concept.

For years, the insurance industry has lulled the Florida Legislature into a cozy alternative reality in which the industry’s failures were caused by forces that the industry could not control: catastrophic storms like Michael and Ian, erroneous adjusters, unscrupulous roofers, ill-informed consumers, and, of course … attorneys.

However, a series of bombshell reports in recent months have shed new light on this reality. The most recent report, first detailed in the Miami Herald and Tampa Times by reporter Lawrence Mower, has upended the industry’s narrative.

Mower’s story detailed a secret 2022 study the Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) withheld for two years despite multiple public records requests.

The study, which cost taxpayers $150,000, found that insurer parent companies were steering billions of dollars to affiliate companies, including Managing General Entities (MGAs), while claiming losses. Mower’s reporting pulled back the curtain and revealed the true cause of our insurance crisis — the industry’s own questionable business practices.

True to form, the industry has responded to these reports with attempts to rewrite reality.

The most recent attempt came Friday when a Tallahassee insurance agency executive, Allen McGinniss, lashed out at Mower’s reporting with a scathing attack on the reporter’s ethics while implying that we all need to be educated on “the structural realities of Florida’s insurance market.”

McGinniss defends the industry’s reliance on Managing General Agents (MGAs), the subject of the OIR study uncovered by Mower, and a business model Florida’s current Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky has said needs a closer look. The Commissioner even proposed legislation seeking greater oversight of MGAs.

McGinniss clearly seeks to rewrite this reality as he quotes former Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty’s support for the model; the problem is — McCarty has not been Commissioner since 2016.

Unfortunately, narratives like this from the industry have led us here.

Relying on industry misinformation, Florida’s elected officials passed a series of pro-insurance, anti-consumer laws in pursuit of “market stability.” Now, the industry and even state regulators claim that Florida has achieved this mythical nirvana of market stability, and Florida’s insurance woes are on the mend.

However, that is not the story lawmakers hear every day in their communities, where they face truly challenging questions from voters. This was clear in recent committee meetings to prepare for Session, and as the South Florida Sun-Sentinel headline explained: Two years after reforms, lawmakers share insurance horror stories.

The story details comments made during a recent House Subcommittee on Insurance and Banking by Rep. Daniel Alvarez. During the committee meeting, the Republican from Riverview in Hillsborough County remarked, “When I’m on the street, I simply don’t know how to talk to my constituents … This is what I know: I know I voted on a bill that every insurance expert told me, ‘Give me two years, Danny, before you start getting hot, right? And you will see either prices stabilize and come down or come down, and I do not know that I have seen either of those two. And when I am the guy who faces the consumer, I just do not know what to tell them anymore other than, ‘I’m sorry.’ I have got people leaving because they cannot afford it anymore, and this is the main driver.”

Here is the reality – in the four years since the Legislature began passing insurance industry reforms, the rate at which insurers deny claims has increased significantly. According to the OIR data, pre-reform storms, Ian and Irma had claims denial rates of 28% and 31%, respectively. Compare that to post-reform storms. Hurricane Milton claims have been closed without payment at a rate of 43%, and Hurricane Helene claims have a 53% likelihood of being denied without any benefits paid.

Insurance companies have attempted to blame flood damage for many of these denial rates and implied that Floridians should have been more responsible and purchased flood insurance, regardless of how high and dry their property was situated.

For years, Florida’s homeowner policies have been allowed to include “anti-concurrency causation” provisions. In simple terms, an ACC provision allows the insurance company to deny an entire claim if it says that any part of the damage was caused by a factor not covered in the policy. ACC abuse is not new; it has been increasingly common since Hurricane Michael in 2018, but Florida’s 2022 and 2023 tort reform laws have empowered insurance companies to deny claims with impunity, knowing that consumers will have an uphill battle to challenge their insurance company.

The trend was concerning enough that Insurance Commissioner Yaworsky sent a memo to Florida insurers on Feb. 20, 2025, requiring them to provide additional data and noting that regulators had “recently learned of potentially concerning behavior relating to anti-concurrent causation policy language and the explicit avoidance of applying coverage for policyholders.”

Due to the excellent reporting of Mower and countless other reporters who have given a voice to the Floridians victimized by their own insurance companies, OIR was finally forced to act.

It is now clear that the industry that exists to support Floridians in their greatest times of distress has manufactured a crisis and used the call for “market stability” to leave their customers blowing in the wind … while they made record profits.

Profits that give many Floridians anxiety.

In a recent poll of 2026 likely General Election voters conducted by the Associated Industries of Florida Center for Political Strategy, one in three likely voters said the cost of property insurance was the most pressing issue facing the state. When asked what costs were causing them the most “anxiety,” four of the top five responses were insurance-related – property and auto insurance, and mortgage and health care costs all topped the list.

AIF was one of the leading voices in support of tort reform, and it speaks volumes that their own polling shows that Floridians are still feeling the pain of the insurance crisis four years into Florida’s failed tort reform experiment.

All of this proves that President Trump was 100% correct two years ago when he called Florida’s industry-backed tort reform law “the biggest insurance industry BAILOUT to Globalist Insurance Companies, IN HISTORY” and “the worst Insurance Scam in the entire Country.”

McGinniss, the Tallahassee insurance agency executive, called Mower’s factual reporting “reckless,” reliant on “cherry-picked data,” and said it was “a clickbait narrative that fuels the public anger while doing nothing to solve the real issues at hand.” But as the saying goes, “A kicked dog howls.”

Instead of attacking journalists for exposing the truth and blaming consumers when their claims are denied, Florida’s insurance companies need to do the hard work and hold themselves and their industry accountable for upholding the contracts that Floridians pay for and deserve to have honored. If they are unwilling or unable to do that, then the Florida Legislature should make them.

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Todd Michaels is president of the Florida Justice Association.