Rick Scott says Florida property insurance rates ‘skyrocketed’ in Ron DeSantis’ era

Rick Scott again isn’t providing Ron DeSantis much rhetorical cover when it comes to Florida’s property insurance problems.

During an interview that aired Sunday, Scott said that rates had “skyrocketed” in the last four years, a time roughly equivalent to DeSantis’ era in Tallahassee.

“And now what you’ve seen is the cost of property insurance has just skyrocketed, in the last four years,” Scott said on WJXT’s “This Week in Jacksonville.”

“Some people are dropping it. And it’s because they can’t afford it,” Scott added. “That’s really a problem.”

Scott said it was important to “get the prices down” in the property insurance market by “eliminating the fraud,” before offering another shiv toward the current policy, spotlighting the expansion of the Citizens Property Insurance customer base, the “insurer of last resort” which is now over a million customers as private insurers have failed or bailed on the state.

“When I was Governor, we worked on dramatically downsizing Citizens Insurance, which we did. By the time I left, it was fully funded,” Scott recounted. “The catastrophic fund was fully funded. What has happened is there was fraud. It’s going to take the Legislature and the Governor to crack down on that to get these rates down.”

“My understanding is now in Florida, the property insurance rates are, I think, three times the national average,” Scott added. “If you have plenty of money, that’s fine.”

“People are going bare now because they can’t afford it,” Scott added. “They’ve got their house paid off and they’re going bare.”

“We’ve got to have good access to insurance,” Scott added. “And it’s got to be a rate you can afford.”

DeSantis, for his part, told reporters this week that it was widely known that Citizens had capital problems and that a relative lack of exposure in Southwest Florida was really fortunate.

He said on Friday his administration “had questions early on even as the storm was hitting about the Citizens Property Insurance, which I think most of you know is unfortunately undercapitalized, and it’s something that if you had a major storm, could be in some problems.”

Luckily for those policyholders at risk from Citizens’ precarious position, “they don’t have quite as many policies in this part of the state as they do in some other parts of the state. So, they feel like they are going to be able to pay the claims that are out.”

Scott’s comments, recorded days before when he was in St. Augustine surveying damage from Hurricane Ian, are his latest expressions of concern over what he has called a “failing” property insurance market during the DeSantis era.

“Citizens has grown quite a bit recently. We’ve got to figure out why these companies are failing. There’s a lot of property insurance companies that have failed recently. We’ve got to figure out why Citizens is the size it is. And how do we make sure that when you have insurance, you actually have real coverage?”

Ahead of the storm, FedNat became the sixth Florida company to leave customers in the lurch, due to unresolved solvency issues. Florida’s Department of Financial Services filed a petition to put the company into receivership.

This came after ratings agency Demotech earlier this year riled state officials by announcing intentions to downgrade 17 companies.

It’s unclear if Scott and DeSantis have spoken substantially since the storm. Scott wanted dialogue but he apparently was rebuffed, the latest indication that the two men don’t get along.

This article first appeared at Florida Politics.