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After churning its destructive path through Florida, Hurricane Ian could do fatal damage to the state’s home-insurance market — posing a potential political headache to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Long before the storm, Florida’s property insurance system was a mess. Hundreds of thousands of Florida homeowners lost their private insurance policies over the last two years, after a dozen companies left the market in the face of billion-dollar annual losses, including several that went under.
Now, the damage wrought by Ian may be the industry’s breaking point in the state.
More than a million Florida homeowners have been forced to turn to Citizens Property Insurance, the state’s publicly funded “insurer of last resort” — meaning that state taxpayers could be on the hook for billions of dollars’ worth of hurricane damage.
