I have a constituent, Taylor, whose house burned down while she was away on her honeymoon last summer. The fire department actually saved most of the structure from the flames, but the water they used destroyed everything. It was no longer a fire claim, but a flooding one. Then, because it took so long to get the check from her insurance company, everything in the house was covered in mold and what was once salvagable, was no longer. It's times like that when you need a good lawyer. 

**I'm going to offer a caveat right here, like the last one, this email is undeniably biased but from a different perspective. Remember, this is part 3 of 5 on my series about the crisis in home affordability and availability as it pertains to homeowners insurance. Take everything in here with a grain of salt that the rest of the story will be told in the other four parts of the series. This is a complicated issue with a variety of perspectives, the solutions require balance. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 here**

I was on the phone the other day with an insurance adjuster who readily admitted that of the few hundred lawsuits on her desk at any given time, she was certain a number were completely legitimate cases where the insurer had fouled up. Her problem was that she had a hard time identifying them in what she described as "the haystack of fraud" that surrounded them.

But each time the insurer short-changes someone or fouls up, that's a family getting traumatized a second time while already struggling to rebuild from disaster.

At the end of the day, as much as premiums are spiking, the WORST case scenario is that even after paying these increased premiums and responsibly staying on top of home maintenance, that your insurer mismanages and short-changes your repairs if catastrophe ever does hit. 

Your one real recourse in those situations is the courts. And unfortunately, many of the reforms we did in last year's reform package, and many of those being floated now, would almost certainly make filing those lawsuits more difficult to win and more expensive for the aggrieved–meaning that people without the means, families trying to recover from a disaster, would have a harder time accessing justice.

While I don't have a lot of sympathy for the *admittedly few* lawyers who continue to get rich filing dozens of lawsuits a day seeking only to force unreasonable settlements, I DO want to make sure any reforms we take to get after the bad actors who are contributing to this crisis don't go so far as to make it cost-prohibitive to seek your justice or make recourse impossible when you need it most.

Here's a statistic that has stayed with me:

1/3 of the $3B in Florida claims were filed by just 25 attorneys.

This is very much a story of a few bad apples that are fleecing our state, and who are making the rest look guilty by association.

One of these attorneys was suspended by the Florida Bar for multiple bar violations and had filed over 10,000 cases against Florida's insurance companies. This story is one where their fellow attorneys saw the excesses and moved to remove them from their ranks. Others are stars of Real Housewives of Miami, and the local attorneys who you see on every billboard in Brandon funding my opponent's campaigns. Why, I ask, do you think that is?

It isn't just attorneys either. Two roofers are facing prison time after being arrested for their roles in promising "free" roofs to get homeowners to sign over their rights to sue the insurance company.

Here's the thing, as I said previously, I'm committed to reforms and holding these bad actors accountable. But, I am equally committed to making sure that any reforms we enact don't go so far as to put your family in jeopardy the next time we get hit by a storm and you need the protection that you've been paying for via insurance premiums for all these years.

Thousands of ethical attorneys, roofers, and public adjusters are getting painted by these few bad apples and we need to protect those that do it right from reforms that go too far.

Also, and this is purely anecdotal I admit, a number of folks I've met with indicated that some of the worst offenders (insurers who were short-changing insured) were seemingly some of the same companies going insolvent. I don't think it's too far of a stretch to imagine that insurance companies on the brink of going under tighten their belts trying to save the company, and in so doing short-change some clients on their claims either knowingly or unknowingly.

So, we've got a few bad insurance companies short-changing people on their claims, a few greedy lawyers making the entire industry look bad. And you're paying too damn much on your insurance premiums as a result. 

So... what do we do about it? Well, remember, this is just part 3 of 5 of this series. Yesterday I made the case about the need for insurance reforms, and today I cautioned of the danger of those reforms going too far. Tomorrow we'll talk about the elephant in the room: the FACT that storms are getting more severe and more frequent due to climate change, and how that's impacting your insurance rates... and what we can do about it.

Until then,