Insurance industry leaders are shooting back at Vice President Kamala Harris’s claim that insurers have abandoned “a lot of the families who have been affected and will be affected” by the Los Angeles wildfires, arguing that it was a “false, wrong and dangerous” statement.
In a Thursday press conference on the ongoing fires, Harris said, “Many insurance companies have canceled insurance for a lot of the families who have been affected and will be affected, which is only going to delay or place an added burden on their ability to recover”:
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“I think that is an important point that must be raised,” the vice president continued, “and hopefully there can be some way to address that issue, because these families — so many of them — otherwise will not have the resources to recover in any meaningful way, and many of them have lost everything.”
Harris’s statement came on the same day that California Department of Insurance spokesman Michael Soller told CBS News that State Farm dropped a staggering 1,600 home insurance policies in the now-devastated Pacific Palisades neighborhood in July.
American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) president and CEO David Sampson pushed back on Harris’s press briefing in a statement to Fox Business:
It is false, wrong and dangerous to even insinuate that insurers are abandoning their customers, and it’s especially concerning coming from a former California statewide elected official who should know the law.
Insurers are committed to protecting the safety of those affected and providing expedited relief to their policyholders for the covered losses.
Noting that California state law prevents insurance companies from canceling policies during its term outside of circumstances like non-payment and fraud, Sampson said that the “implication that people who have insurance coverage effective on January 7th are being canceled — just to leave that impression with people and to create that fear — is irresponsible, in my view.”
State Farm discontinued coverage for 72,000 California homes in 2024, and over 100,000 state residents have lost their home insurance since 2019, a San Francisco Chronicle analysis revealed.
The Pacific Palisades fire, which has burned through 22,660 acres with containment at 11 percent after sparking on Tuesday, is set to become “one of the state’s costliest” ever, according to NBC News.
Sampson said he has been warning state regulators for years about the unsustainable insurance market in California.
“Over the last almost decade now, for every dollar of homeowners premium that we have collected, we have paid out $1.09 in claims — and that’s not sustainable,” he told Fox Business.
