For families and seniors across South Florida, the most dreaded piece of mail is no longer a bill, it’s the property insurance renewal notice. The sticker shock is real, and the anxiety it causes is a quiet crisis unfolding in every neighborhood. This is not a force of nature; it is a man-made storm of market failure and flawed policy, and it has put the dream of homeownership at risk for the very people who built our communities.
While Tallahassee has taken important initial steps, the crisis has continued to evolve. Lasting relief requires us to address the fundamental market failures driving up costs. The result is predictable: Citizens Insurance swells, private carriers flee, and you, the homeowner, are left to pay the spiraling cost.
Yoni Anijar is a Republican candidate for Florida House District 100. (courtesy, Yoni Anijar)
My professional background has prepared me for this specific challenge. As a private practice attorney, I navigate complex contracts and regulations daily. As a captain in the U.S. Army JAG Corps, I serve by delivering principled legal counsel on a broad spectrum of complex matters impacting our forces. Florida’s insurance crisis is an economic threat of the first order, and it demands that same level of rigorous analysis and strategic leadership, not more political half-measures.
While a difficult legal environment has been a contributing factor, an issue the Legislature has begun to address, it does not tell the whole story. To deliver real, lasting relief, we must look beyond the obvious and dismantle the true engine of this crisis: the interplay between sophisticated fraud and our state’s crippling dependency on the global reinsurance market.
My plan has three core objectives.
Incentivize a local reinsurance market. Reinsurance is the insurance that insurance companies themselves must buy to cover catastrophic losses. Currently, Florida is dangerously reliant on a small handful of overseas reinsurance corporations that effectively hold our market hostage. When they hike their rates, your premiums explode. We must break this dependency by cultivating our own sources of capital. I will champion a state-sponsored initiative to grow a robust, Florida-based market for catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities. In plain English, we turn Florida’s risk into a financial asset that a wider pool of global investors can buy into. This creates competition for the traditional reinsurers, breaks their pricing power, and directly attacks the single largest cost-driver in your insurance premium.
Aggressively prosecute organized fraud. The fraud plaguing our state is not the work of desperate homeowners with legitimate storm damage; it is the product of sophisticated, organized criminal enterprises. My focus is not on penalizing honest people but on dismantling the predatory business models of scamming contractors and their networks. We must empower state prosecutors with a dedicated task force that has the resources and authority to pursue complex, RICO-level cases against these criminal organizations. We will protect homeowners by prosecuting the predators who drive up costs for everyone.
Foster a truly competitive marketplace. Competition is the ultimate consumer protection, but new insurers will not enter a broken market. My first two objectives create the conditions for their return. With a stable reinsurance foundation and a predictable claims environment, capital will flow back into Florida. We must then ensure the Office of Insurance Regulation has a streamlined process for vetting and approving new, well-capitalized carriers so they can begin competing for your business without delay. More choices for homeowners is the only sustainable path to lower prices and better service.
There are other ideas being debated in Tallahassee, and I am committed to working with anyone who is serious about solving this problem. But Floridians cannot afford another round of temporary rebates or accounting gimmicks that ignore the foundational issues.
My approach is not about siding with any lobby or corporation. My only side is that of the Florida homeowner, the family trying to make ends meet, the senior on a fixed income, and the young couple saving for their first home. I am not a career politician who learned about this issue from a briefing book. I am a professional trained to analyze complex systems, identify critical vulnerabilities, and execute a plan to solve the problem.
Let’s bring that discipline to Tallahassee and finally win this fight for Florida’s homeowners.
Yoni Anijar is a Republican candidate for Florida House District 100.