The lawyer, consumer advocate and former San Francisco supervisor told CalMatters that the commissioner\u2019s office has been \u201cunder-leveraged\u201d and has the levers to protect people from the powerful insurance industry.<\/p>\n
Kim, a Democrat and head of the California Working Families Party, has three main proposals around more government involvement, the main one to create \u201cnatural disaster insurance for all.\u201d It would be funded by a portion of policyholder premiums that insurance companies would pass along to the state. The state would manage the fund, which would guarantee fire and flood coverage. Insurance companies would continue to provide coverage for other risks. It\u2019s not her idea \u2014 New Zealand has the same system, and it allows the country to invest the premiums in preventive measures, she said. Establishing such a system in California could allow the state to invest profit from premiums that would have gone to insurers\u2019 shareholders in its communities instead, she said.<\/p>\n
She would establish a public option for auto insurance by expanding eligibility for an existing program that provides low-cost insurance to drivers who make less than $38,000 a year.<\/p>\n
Kim also wants to provide Medicare for kids. She believes California should centralize all insurance authority within the insurance department instead of having managed health care handled by the Managed Health Care Department.<\/p>\n
She acknowledges that her biggest ideas are for the long term and will require her to win over naysayers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve heard it \u2014 \u2018She doesn\u2019t know anything,\u2019 \u201d Kim said. \u201cWe\u2019re all so tired of seeing candidates that don\u2019t have political courage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kim is endorsed by some big names, including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont \u2014 she was California political director for his presidential campaign in 2020 \u2014 Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressmember, and unions such as SEIU California, the California Teachers Association and the UFCW Western States Council.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The lawyer, consumer advocate and former San Francisco supervisor told CalMatters that the commissioner\u2019s office has been \u201cunder-leveraged\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[124030,7,9,8,3002],"class_list":["post-290546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-2026-primary-election","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-insurance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}