Action News Jax is digging into the Florida Gubernatorial candidates\u2019 property insurance plans after Republican Candidate Byron Donalds began airing ads claiming his Democratic opponent David Jolly\u2019s plan would result in a $1,000-a-year hurricane tax. <\/p>\n
In simple terms, Jolly wants the state to take over hurricane insurance and move the coverage out of the private sector.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen this before. I remember when the Affordable Care was being talked about. We were told that you could keep your doctor, you could keep your plan, premiums were gonna go down,\u201d said Donalds.<\/p>\n
Donalds points to a Florida State University study that found if Citizens Property Insurance, Florida\u2019s state-backed insurer of last resort, were to take over all hurricane coverage, major storms could result in assessments averaging $1,000 per-household.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnytime the government takes over an entire industry, especially insurance, it almost never works,\u201d said Donalds. \u201dThe premiums go significantly higher than what was promised and the benefits actually go down.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in an interview with Action News Jax, Jolly claimed his plan to use state\u2019s $12 billion hurricane fund to replace private hurricane insurance would decrease premiums by as much as 70 percent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe bottom line is if you\u2019re comfortable with where homeowners insurance is in Florida right now, then listen to Byron Donalds. He\u2019s promising exactly more of the same,\u201d said Jolly.<\/p>\n
Jolly also said he wants to hold insurance companies more accountable by limiting their ability to hide profits by shifting earnings to affiliate companies.<\/p>\n
It was recently revealed<\/a> dozens of insurers paid more than $1 billion combined in affiliate fees, all while reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in losses that pushed lawmakers to pass reforms that made it harder for policyholders to their insurance companies to court.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason the market has stabilized is because they gave away even more to insurance companies,\u201d said Jolly. \u201cTalk to the family in Pinellas County that lost their home in Helene who is still waiting to be compensated by their insurance company.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked whether Donalds would undo any of the insurance reforms passed in recent years, he said he would not.<\/p>\n Instead, he proposed publicizing an insurer score card, so the public could spot bad actors and avoid doing business with them.<\/p>\n >>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<<\/a><\/p>\n [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks<\/a>]<\/p>\n [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter<\/a>] <\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here<\/a> to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here<\/a> to stream Action News Jax live.<\/p>\n Action News Jax Top Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Action News Jax is digging into the Florida Gubernatorial candidates\u2019 property insurance plans after Republican Candidate Byron Donalds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":419156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[982,165681,58473,58471,165680,44843,36239,28,3603,165682,969,43596,116,118,117,54990,970,36390,634,53393,11103,6176],"class_list":["post-419155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-action_news","tag-affordable_care_act","tag-byron_donalds","tag-david_jolly","tag-david_jowie","tag-democratic","tag-donald","tag-florida","tag-fsu","tag-hillane","tag-jack","tag-jack_state","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-jake_snowfan","tag-jake_stoan","tag-jolly","tag-local","tag-pinellas_county","tag-republican","tag-south_bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=419155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/419156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=419155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=419155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=419155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}