Citizens Insurance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Citizens Insurance, or Citizens, is the popular name of the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, a government created not-for-profit insurer in the State of Florida. Citizens was created in 2002 to provide property insurance for home-owners who could not obtain insurance elsewhere. This is not the same company as Citizens Insurance Company of America, an unrelated property and casualty insurance carrier in the Midwest that has existed since 1915, or the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance that was created for similar purposes.
As more and more companies have pulled out of the Florida market due to the extraordinary number of hurricane and sinkhole related claims over the last few years, Citizens has become not the insurer of last resort but the insurer of only resort for many Floridians. The cost of insurance and its availability has thus become an important "hot button" issue in Florida, especially in the 2006 elections.
From their web site: In 2002, the Florida Legislature passed a law that combined the Florida Residential Property and Casualty Joint Underwriting Association (FRPCJUA) and the Florida Windstorm Underwriting Association (FWUA). This resulted in the creation of Citizens Property insurance Corporation (Citizens), whose goal is to more efficiently and effectively provide insurance to, and serve the needs of, home-owners in high-risk areas and others who cannot find coverage in the open, private insurance market.
Up until the beginning of 2007, Citizens Insurance charged its customers the highest legal rate (highest approved rate by the Office of Insurance Regulation) so as to avoid competing with private carriers. Insurance agents were actually prohibited from writing policies through Citizens if there was a private (not surplus lines) carrier who could write the risk. With the recent changes by the Florida legislature, Citizens is now actually reducing their rates and agents may write a Citizens policy for customers if a comparable policy offered by a private carrier is 15% greater (Florida Senate Bill 2498 (the Glitch Bill) signed into law by Governor Crist on June 11, 2007). Also, customers are now allowed to keep their Citizens policy if they do not wish to be insured by an assuming carrier - an insurance company who is taking the risk from Citizens; previously customers who were "taken out" were not allowed a choice (www.citizensfla.com).
