Florida Insurance Commissioner to Become Elected Post Again?

InsureMe Agent Blog has a post up regarding Insurance Journal’s recent article on one of the proposed insurance reforms in Florida. From IJ:

In 1998 Florida voters shrunk the Cabinet from six members to three plus the governor, eliminating the elected insurance commissioner. The details of how to assign responsibility for regulating insurance were left up to lawmakers, who decided that an appointed commissioner would take some politics out of the equation.

To deal with that, [Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton] said that under his proposal, candidates for an elected post would be barred from taking campaign contributions from the insurance industry.

How simply prohibiting campaign contributions from the industry would remove politics from the equation escapes me. True, it makes it difficult for the industry to buy a Commissioner of choice, but you still have the potential for political gamesmanship in the form of competing candidates competing by promising ever greater amounts of bread and circuses to the electorate who will decide whether they get into office.

Thus, you end up with an increased likelihood of a pro-consumer, anti-industry Commissioner…when in fact you ideally want a Commissioner who is able to strike an appropriate balance between the interests of the consumer and fiscal/economic realities, and who can cut through the B.S. coming from both sides when seeking an answer to the challenge of the day.

InsureMe Agent Blog also offers some words of wisdom:

Now, I hate to point out the obvious, but Florida sees a lot of hurricanes. And while I understand that the public needs to feel some sort of responsibility [read: control] over the insurance regulations in their state, if I were a Florida home or business owner, I’d expect to be paying a fair amount to insure my property. And, I’d probably expect that with eight hurricanes in two years, insurers would need to increase their rates to cover their risk or they’d go out of business. And then Florida home insurance would be akin to New Jersey auto insurance, it’d be a mess and Florida residents would be even more upset.