Allstate has joined State Farm in ending the sale of property insurance in California. They claim it’s over natural disasters, but something doesn’t add up.
As we reported last week, State Farm ceased selling new property insurance to California residents and businesses, citing climate change as a primary concern that would cause increased natural disasters. Allstate technically beat them to the punch by ending the practice last year, but they didn’t make it official until Friday.
According to CBS News:
Allstate quietly stopped issuing new policies in California months ago, but didn’t announce the move until Friday. Allstate was the fourth-largest insurer in California, according to the most recent 2021 state data. It earned $4.3 billion in premiums that year and incurred $2.6 billion in losses.
“We paused new homeowners, condo and commercial insurance policies in California last year so we can continue to protect current customers,” Allstate told CBS News in a statement Friday. “The cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires, higher costs for repairing homes, and higher reinsurance premiums.”
In 2021, California experienced at least 7,396 wildfires, which burned nearly 2.6 million acres of land, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The state had an additional 7,490 wildfires that burned 362,455 acres last year.
There are two problems with the natural disaster narrative. The biggest one is the obvious question of value. With higher risk comes higher premiums paid to insurance companies. Rather than shutting down business in the most populace state in the nation, they could mitigate risks by offering higher premiums. Fewer homeowners would buy it, but certainly some would.
The other challenge with their narrative is that the wildfire frequency has not increased. In fact, last year’s total burned acreage was below the average over the last four decades.
Are insurance companies blaming wildfires for bailing on California so they don’t have to call out other challenges like rampant crime, a dying economy, and woke policies, or do they know something we don’t know?
