LA wildfires: Is insurance the next battlefront for California residents?
Ray Lehmann, editor-in-chief and senior fellow at ICLE, contributed to this Al Jazeera story on the L.A. wildfires. Read the full article here.
In 2017, the Thomas Fire razed 1,060 structures in California’s Ventura and Santa Barbara. In July 2018, the Mendocino Complex Fire destroyed 280 structures in Mendocino, Lake, Colusa and Glenn counties, and in November 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed almost 19,000 buildings in Northern California’s Butte County.
Proposition 103 “contributed to the challenges” faced in the California insurance market, Ray Lehmann, senior fellow at independent research organisation, International Center for Law and Economics, told Al Jazeera.
Lehmann said the most notable of these challenges is that the proposition has “historically not permitted insurers to consider the cost of reinsurance or the output of forward-looking catastrophe models when filing rates”.