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SACRAMENTO, Calif. — As I’ve written for years here at The American Spectator, California has incinerated its insurance market by imposing price controls on insurers. Instead of risking their capital reserves by selling home policies that are inadequate to cover potential claims, the state’s largest insurers have been pulling out of the market. Insurance companies are in the business to write insurance, so it’s an indictment of our regulatory system that they don’t want to do business here. As property owners struggle to find insurance policies, they’ve increasingly had to rely on the FAIR Plan (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements). The state created this industry-funded system in 1968 after the Watts Riots when insurers became reluctant to write policies in high-risk areas. It’s now the system of last resort for homeowners in areas at risk of wildfires. It offers high-priced, barebones coverage that is better than nothing, although just barely. The whole situation reminds me of a humorous postcard I saw when I first moved to Southern California. It depicted LA’s four seasons: fires, mudslides, earthquakes, and riots. I didn’t realize that it was actually a clever depiction of the constant challenges faced here by insurance companies. Other states have insurance struggles, too, but our state’s ongoing crisis is directly related to the Proposition 103 system voters enacted in 1988. At the time, insurance rates were soaring, but it wasn’t the result of market failure. The California Supreme Court’s Royal Globe decision in 1979 “gave an accident victim the right to bring a claim for punitive damages against another person’s liability insurer if the victim felt that the insurer had engaged in unfair claims settlement practices,” according to a 2001 RAND report. As a result, payouts, litigation, and premiums soared by 26 percent. California voters, who are often tasked with sorting through mind-numbingly complex issues at the ballot box, faced a suite of insurance-related initiatives on that year’s ballot. Frustrated by rising prices caused by that court decision rather than insurer “greed,” they approved the worst of the batch. Prop. 103 created a prior-approval rate system that gave the insurance commissioner — now an elected position — the right to approve or even roll back rates. The court eventually overturned Royal Globe, but the damage was set in stone. Lawmakers have known for years that the system was headed for disaster and that the FAIR Plan wouldn’t be able to handle major wildfire events. Only recently have officials — in the midst of the spiraling crisis — finally approved some decent reforms that, say, let insurers include rising reinsurance costs in rate decisions, speed up the rate-review process, and allow insurers to use forward-looking catastrophe models to set prices. Then Los Angeles turned into a fireball, well before we had a chance to see if these changes would work. Insurance expert (and my R Street Institute colleague) Jerry Theodorou explained in a Feb. 3 column that the number of FAIR Plan policy holders increased 41 percent from September 2023 to September 2024, yet the plan only “has approximately $200 million of surplus, and $700 million cash on hand. This may not be enough to pay all its claims. The plan is skating on thin ice financially, as it must pay $900 million in losses before receiving up to $2.63 billion in support from reinsurance…. This means that the FAIR Plan would have to find more money.” Sure enough, the Washington Post reported the following this week: “California’s home insurance plan of last resort has run out of money to pay the wave of claims stemming from the Los Angeles fires and will receive a bailout of $1 billion.” The money will come out of the hide of the FAIR Plan’s membership, which means it comes from the insurance companies that are already trying to exit our struggling market. Again, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to state officials, despite any blather about “perfect storms.” The 100 miles-per-hour Santa Ana winds combined with unusually dry tinder — largely the result of California’s inadequate brush-clearing and water policies — were a perfect storm of sorts. But it’s a storm that anyone could see coming for years. As I noted in my testimony before a U.S. House subcommittee last week that looked at regulations that exacerbated the wildfires: “Because of the regulation-driven contraction of our insurance market, many homeowners in the L.A. area didn’t have coverage or were reliant on … the FAIR Plan. There’s much talk of that barebones system facing possible insolvency. Rather than addressing the insurance emergency, the governor and lawmakers found time for a performative special legislative session about so-called oil-industry price gouging.” In recent months, we’ve read many news reports about the situation. “The FAIR Plan continues to grow in size as consumers find themselves without coverage. As a result, we have doubled in size in the last three years. As those numbers climb, our financial stability comes more into question,” said the FAIR Plan president in March 2024. That led to hearings and some reforms that address some aspects of the plan’s financing, but it was only a matter of time before yet another wildfire season would press it to the breaking point. It’s about priorities. Our state officials give short shrift to basics such as insurance, water, brush clearance, building regulations, and whatnot and use climate change as a handy excuse for their inaction. There’s probably no other option but the above-mentioned bailout, but it would be nice if California’s leadership was proactive for a change. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Trump: Look at the Slow-Moving FDA California Incinerated Its Insurance Market The post After the Wildfires, a Predictable Bailout appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Everything is happening so fast that, as a journalist, I sometimes find it hard to pause and analyze the facts. It is said that Trump’s collaborators are exhausted by their extremely heavy workload, but on the other side of the Atlantic, the president’s friends aren’t exactly holding back either in their eagerness for the advent of a new era of freedom and common sense. Last weekend, the third force in the European Parliament, the Patriots party, held its summit in Madrid, with the presence of its main leaders: Martin Helme (Estonia), Afroditi Latinopoulou (Greece), Petr Macinka (Czech Republic), Krzysztof Bosak (Poland), Geert Wilders (Netherlands), Matteo Salvini (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), and Santiago Abascal (Spain and president of Patriots).  Although with different ideological nuances, these leaders share three fundamental ideas: the need to recover national sovereignty in the face of EU interference, the fight against illegal immigration, and the war on woke policies. Exactly the same ones they share with Trump, whom they look up to and admire as a role model when it comes to turning wokeism inside out like a sock, containing the immigration emergency, and slimming the state’s tallowy ass.  The European Parliament is the closest thing to a poultry farm you can imagine. It’s full of an infinity of chickens all alike, photocopies of the idiot Macron, even if they belong to different parties. Then there is an important collection of lunatics, let’s say headless chickens, each with a different obsession, be it Marxist nostalgia or the desire for us all to ride down freeways on scooters. And finally there is a group — thank God it’s growing — of patriots (hence the name of the party) with firm convictions that they are unafraid to express. Both the photocopied chickens and the headless chickens live with a single purpose: that Patriots never come to power. They are capable of entangling, mixing, mingling, and even immolating themselves — and all of Europe — if that will keep Patriots from deciding things.  It makes sense. The garbage migration policies that have managed to turn European capitals into a branch of Africa, or failing that, into a container of alleged refugees of Arab origin, come from that “center-right.” First to screw things up was Angela Merkel, and now it’s the ostrich-faced Ursula von der Leyen, with enthusiastic support from the Socialists, who always support anything that dilutes the Christian origins of Europe.  The European Parliament is led by von der Leyen’s European People’s Party, followed by the Socialists and Democrats group, and the sovereignist Patriots bloc. Although the European People’s Party defines itself as a center-right party, as the Socialists have slipped to the far-Left, the European People’s Party has settled into a limbo between Christian Democracy (which might as well do away with “Christian”) and Social Democracy (which might as well do away with “democracy”), voting along with the Left for the green and woke policies that are ruining Europe. The Madrid event, which opened with a dinner and speech by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, carried a slogan inspired by Trump’s campaigns: “Make Europe great again.” There, Santiago Abascal, host and leader of Vox in Spain, said: “We are witnessing great changes in the world that give us great hope, and lately there has been much talk about some of these changes, but I think many of you have been pioneers in your nations, you have been ahead of the changes that are being experienced on the other side of the Atlantic.” And it is true. The wave of hope that Trump’s victory has brought to the West is indescribably important, but things had already begun to change before the Nov. 5 election. In Europe, the new Right (in any mainstream media they will tell you that it is extreme-ultra-super-extremist-Right) has been gaining positions and even taking power, the cases of Orbán in Hungary and Le Pen in France being the best known, as well as Giorgia Meloni in Italy, although the latter remains in the European People’s Party, promoting, for now unsuccessfully, an alliance between this group and the Patriots.  Let us hope that the patriotic wave of common sense sweeps away everything and restores to Europe the light that once shone from it. And may the equidistant, small-mouthed conservatives decide whether they want to join the wave, or continue strolling resignedly through Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Marseilles, Luxembourg, Milan, or Frankfurt like people crossing the densest and most fervent streets of Tehran. A patriotic Europe, not a self-conscious one, free of woke madness will be a far better ally for Trump’s America than any of the airheaded leaders we are enduring now, from the apprentice dictator Pedro Sánchez in Spain, to the suspect of all things bad Emmanuel Macron, let alone the lemon-biting Olaf Scholz. READ MORE: The Table of Cruel Non-Binaries: Media Attack on MAGA Influencers at Inauguration Backfires Trump Sets Foot on the Lord of the Flies Island and Brings Reality to the Wild Children The post Patriots Summit in Madrid Declares War on Wokeism in the EU appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.