At the end of last year, California issued emergency new insurance regulations giving insurers more freedom to raise premiums while also requiring them to extend coverage to wildfire-prone areas of the state.
The hope was that this compromise of higher premiums and more coverage would set right the crisis of insurers fleeing the state and leaving homeowners with no private options for financially protecting their homes from the next disaster.
The reality is that these reforms might be too little and come too late. Now, the still-burning Palisades and Eaton fires (estimated to have caused $150 billion in damages) seem to be pushing politicians back into their old, bad habits of bullying insurers into doing business in California.
