The Florida primary election is in a couple of weeks so right around now is when most Floridians will start thinking about their choices. Here’s a proposal by the leading Democrat, David Jolly (until yesterday, a Republican!), to set up, without legislative approval, a massive state-run insurance company for hurricane and wind damage:
Unless insurance companies are making 60-70% profits right now, the only way that the state-run enterprise that Mx. Jolly proposes to start can cut costs by 60-70% is by transferring those costs from Florida homeowners to Florida renters (i.e., it will lose money over the years, but get topped up periodically by infusions of tax dollars that are collected from a combination of homeowners (who get them back via this subsidized insurance) and renters (who don’t get any money back)).
This makes Jolly the inverse of Ayatollah Mamdani, whose rent freeze steals from property owners (landlords) and gives it to renters in the form of rent that gets lower every year relative to the market and lower also in real dollars because “frozen” means not adjusted even for CPI inflation. I suppose that there are also some similarities with the Mamdani Caliphate, e.g., (1) voters will easily accept the idea that a state-run enterprise, e.g., Mamdani’s city grocery stores, can have lower costs than a private enterprise, and (2) voters are eager to vote for a politician who promises to transfer wealth from some other group into their own pockets.
Maybe insurance companies actually do make 60-70% profits in Florida? Here’s our Florida-centric homeowner’s insurance company’s KBRA risk rating report. It looks like they broke even in 2022 (Hurricane Ian) and made a 10% profit in 2025 (no hurricanes made landfall anywhere in the U.S.).
(The state-run enterprise, especially if private insurance is outlawed as the tweet seems to suggest, could perhaps also steal from homeowners in low-risk areas, e.g., central Florida, and give to homeowners in high-risk coastal areas. That could be accomplished by smoothing out what should be massive rate differences between these types of neighborhoods. One more possibility is stealing from people who live in new houses by overcharging them and using that surplus to undercharge people in old hurricane-vulnerable houses.)
Finally, as a minor fact-check point in a field (politics) where nobody cares about facts, the Florida homeowners insurance market has not actually collapsed. Rates are trending down, especially after inflation adjustment, after some legislative changes during the DeSantis administration that cut back on litigation between homeowners and insurers.
Related:
In case the above tweet is memory-holed…
Downstream effect of the emphasis on home ownership and having most of your wealth tied up in a house where you live. Nobody is clamoring for S&P500 insurance
Gootube is awash in tales of rent hyperinflation down there. The government continues trading it against falling wages. Renters already subsidize mortgage interest, down payments, & solar panels in Calif*. Hooray for a blog post that wasn’t AI generated.
We rented from individuals until we had enough money to buy a house with cash. Sure we subsidized their mortgage, insurance, property tax, etc. Sure they were wishy-washy and sometimes sold it out from under us. But we avoided taking money directly from the devil (or 3rd ring 7th circle, usury season ticket holders in Hell, anyway). And we made up for it by keeping only one car for more than five years, paid for in cash.
I suspect this (D) candidate is the stronger one, and Greenspun is going after him to give the (R) one an easier opponent in the election. Or he could just really not like free money. 😉
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” — Shakespeare, sometimes mis-attributed to the Bible
OAG: I don’t know whether David Jolly is stronger than whoever wins the Republican nomination. As noted in the original post, Jolly was a Republican until recently and by the standards of the Righteous, still is a Republican (he doesn’t have a “free Palestine” banner, for example, nor “defund ICE”). https://davidjolly.com/issues/ says that his position on abortion care is essentially Republican as well: “Florida should codify the Roe/Casey framework.”
(Roe v. Wade allows abortion care until the pregnant person’s potential child can survive outside the pregnant person; it did not say “every state must allow abortion care at Week 37” (the current Righteous standard))
I was really just joking. I don’t have the pretense of understanding modern politics, or the Machiavellian underpinnings. Maybe Jolly Roger would be more advantageous as a candidate. The Republican could say, “At least with me you are only getting a Republican, not both a Republican and a liar.”
And maybe DeSantis should run for a third term as a shoe-in, set a precedent for Trump. (Joking again). Speaking of jokes, renters are the Rodney Dangerfield of the housed — who the hell cares if they are oppressed. Most of them kind of are deadbeats in the land of the American dream, but still. I had roughly 1/4 the domestic workload as a renter as I do with this albatross of an abode, and some asshole banker never got to light joints using one of my $100 bills.
One might think that if Jolly really knew how to price insurance he would be running an insurance company and making a lot of money for himself rather than sharing his expertise gratis with the good people of Florida. Florida homeowners’ insurance does not sound like an attractive business and it seems that many companies like Progressive have pulled out- presumably because they cannot write policies commensurate with risk. Olympus seems to have $254m of capital to pay out claims, which does not sound like a lot for a market like Fl. It is a private company with very limited public information & owned by something called SageSure. Olympus is not rated by AM Best, the insurance rating agency. It seems to reinsure though something called Abascap Re, some sort of off-shore entity that issued some sort of bond as reinsurance. The bond is $120m. How much of this reinsurance is included in Olympus’s $254m of “admitted assets” is unclear. Just how all of this would play out in the event of a disaster is unclear.
Question: do any of the major carriers offer homeowners insurance in your area? How do their prices for the same coverage compare with Olympus’s?
jdc: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2026/05/06/does-it-make-sense-to-pay-for-high-net-worth-insurance-in-coastal-south-florida/ explains the situation in our neighborhood. The obvious suspects, such as State Farm and Progressive, won’t write our neighborhood at any price. Some of the Chubb-style companies will, but at 2.5-4X the Olympus price. They have zero risk of default after a huge hurricane, but also insist that you overinsure.
(There is no way to estimate Olympus’s risk of failure if a major hurricane hits Palm Beach County (last one was in 1949) because Olympus doesn’t publish a map of where they’ve written coverage. I don’t know if a 20-mile-wide destruction zone that includes our house would damage 10 Olympus houses or 1,000 Olympus houses.)
I see – you covered a lot of this in the earlier post. Seems to make sense to pay ~8K for a policy from Olympus notwithstanding that in a big disaster Olympus has a much higher likelihood of going insolvent than say Chubb. I suppose from the point of view of SageSure it would make sense to acquire a diverse portfolio of Olympus-type companies knowing that some would go insolvent in the event of a major disaster.