In the midst of a brutal fire season, California is faced with the double whammy of private insurers leaving the state while the state’s own insurance program is dreadfully short on funds to pay claims.
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To properly frame this story about California’s property insurance woes, a bit of background. In a previous life, I worked for a California-based insurance provider. While I was on the IT side of things, later moving to marketing (now there’s a story, albeit for another time), I learned some insurance business fundamentals. One is that a private insurance provider is required to have sufficient reserves, along with reinsurance if need be, to where if one morning every single policyholder filed a claim for the maximum amount of their policy, and the company paid every claim in full that afternoon, the…
