WaPo: ““UPC abandoned me,” said Ed, a recently retired tortilla distributor who paid as much as $1,930 a year to UPC for insurance. “I never missed a payment. I expected them to do what they said in my contract: return my house to what it was the day before hurricane hit. I never even got an inkling of that from these people and now I know why: They were going to go out of business.”
UPC, the ninth property insurer in Florida to go insolvent since 2021, and the largest to do so in 15 years, left many of its Florida customers in a similar nightmare, facing what is predicted to be a powerful hurricane season with still unfixed, hazardous homes, drained life savings and, in some cases, no insurance to protect them.
Suddenly losing their carrier while still in the thick of recovery was shocking to the Raggies, as well as other homeowners. But UPC’s collapse was long in the making — and is one of the most glaring examples of how, in the age of climate change, Florida’s insurance system has been failing to protect residents after they endure a major disaster….
Now, the state-run Florida Insurance Guaranty Association is responsible for trying to close 22,000 UPC claims, which will take more than a year and probably cost around $600 million, officials say. For the first time since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the state has to levy an emergency assessment on nearly all Florida residents to help cover the cost of such a massive insolvency, further spiking homeowners’ rates.
While Florida residents are shouldering the burden of the insurer’s collapse, its former executives and shareholders are in better shape.”