Some get ecstatic about dance, I am enraptured today about insurance. For the first time in 5 years, I was able to buy home insurance from an insurance company.
After Liberty Mutual unceremoniously non-renewed me with no reason provided, I found that all of California's admitted insurance companies were in what appeared to me to be a criminal monopoly/cabal. Almost every one of them, and I called them all, gave me the same nonsensical answer about something called “brush maps” indicating my home was likely to turn into a Cleone Candle at any moment. Sometimes word for word. Whoever “brush maps” was, I was not allowed to see him or ask him any questions. Almost everybody was using the same bogus AI mapping program to deny me insurance, which seems like a possible crime to me, if only insurance companies weren’t above the law.
Rich Pyorre first rescued me with Lloyds of London once, but then after a few years nothing changed on my end but they decided to join all the insurance companies admitted to sell insurance by the state of California by refusing to write me a policy. This included the likes of State Farm and Farmers as well as all those available to independent brokers. I tried Costco, AAA and goofy online companies that people suggested, which actually simply go to Liberty Mutual and such and charge the consumer a markup. That’s also true of Geico, which advertises it sells home insurance, but actually doesn’t, it's just another middleman to the cabal. Many locals and local insurance folks hunted and hunted, none as hard as Rich. I thought I had been to every broker in town but missed one.
I checked every year, it was as if I was a teenage suitor living in his mother's basement and asking Naomi Campbell out on a date.. NO NO NO NO insurance for you! Then bang I was talking to Jay McMartin-Rosenquist and she told me she got home insurance from Team Insurance between D’Aurelios and DMV in Fort Bragg. I called and Noble over in Ukiah wrote me insurance in less than five minutes.
Holy pickled albacore batman!
Here is the insurance company, if you are one of the many people I have met going without, call them or better yet, an independent local broker and give it a try. It's Delos and the mainstream underwriter is Homesite. You might think I live in a wildfire zone. You would be wrong. I am 250 yards from that little firebreak called the Pacific Ocean. A good portion of our property is a pond. We are near sea level, always wet, even in a drought. The neighbors are also all swamp critters, with year round marsh on the back property so deep I can sink past my considerable middle and up to my Irish eyebrows.
My dad, the previous owner and an engineer, and curious type fella, with the help of a few old friends working off the books, did a core sample and was amazed to find our sand went down and down and down and finally turned to sandstone, then into harder sandstone. No sign of the bedrock, something he was always searching for in his days driving piles for bridge construction. He and his pals concluded this place had been sand dunes until less than 1000 years ago and had been sand dunes probably for 20,000 years before that, maybe more.
The sandy part of the sample showed there had never been a wildfire here so it has likely been since before the pyramids were built since any fire scorched the bishop pine, bull pine, grand fir and redwood trees here.
This all was blatantly obvious for decades to Liberty Mutual, who sent a jolly adjuster out in the old days for coffee, stories and a shot of strength from the walled city of Tullamore . They have long since fired the adjusters and won't send anyone out nor will they consider any FACTS about the property.
We don’t need no stinking facts, we have AI!!!
This made me very curious and I began to investigate. I found out that this has nothing to do with wildfires. It is happening in every state and across the world at the same rate. But in California the insurance companies can quickly find a nitwit in the media who will compose a story that makes the insurance companies brave heroes in the face of wildfires. I mean it does seem obvious. But it's not true.
It's about AI, saving money and scamming their own charters. I'm going to say that three more times in this rant because nobody seems to be able to hear the truth today.
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I did a piece for Real Estate Magazine a couple years ago where I interviewed everyone from state senators to the insurance commissioner to insurance companies and what I found is that blaming California's wildfires is literally a smokescreen. That article was much more objective and complete than this rant. If you ask at frankhartzell@gmail.com I will send you a copy.
If any libertarians are still reading, please stop now as I am going to point out the fact that insurance companies, when they form, must agree not to practice discrimination. Horrors! The powerful have to follow rules and not simply rob us all! It's the job of the courts and the other two branches of our state and federal government to make them do this. If insurance was only for the wealthiest people in the most safe areas, everybody else would either perish in a calamity of any kind or be paid for by the rest of us in the end.
I realize this idiocy is also called libertarian paradise.
Many years ago insurance companies played all these same kinds of tricks in order NOT to sell insurance to black people. Those efforts were called redlining. I could show you the original charter from the 1950s of a Fort Bragg housing association for a new subdivision that includes “no blacks.”
This nasty stuff led to the creation of the California FAIR plan (Fair Access to Insurance) in 1968. The plan is composed of all the admitted insurance companies selling as a group. It's not a government agency, so they can control it even more that way. It's also a scam. They create regulations as a cabal that allow them to get out of risky insurance. They dump people like me, who really aren’t risky into the FAIR plan, where we get very sketchy and almost not worth doing insurance for 3x the cost of what I used to pay. So instead of paying liberty mutual $780 a year (which was probably a bit low considering any fire risk) I was paying close to $4000 for a much lesser policy. Liberty Mutual gets more money cooperating in the cabal than it did from me directly. In fact the FAIR plan didn't cover the contents of my house and so I had to go to Safeco, which is owned by Liberty Mutual and pay them more than I paid for my entire policy.
The most grim aspect of this scam is not that guys like me are paying more per month for insurance than I did to rent my house in Ohio. The worst part of this is the catastrophic impact, including future deaths and widespread mayhem that is caused when all the insurance companies in your state start ignoring fire prevention as a factor in insurance and only considering AI maps because it’s cheaper than having a good ole boy come out and look at 50 houses in a day and write a long list of ways we can all do better to protect our homes from fire, which we all did back then..
Our entire neighborhood was willing to get together collectively and reduce fire risk But this matters not in the slightest to admitted California cabal insurance companies. They are not even slightly interested in reducing fire risk. Read my article in the Real Estate Magazine about fire captains losing their insurance and being unable to talk to their insurance companies about how much they had done to fire harden their homes. Insurance companies are doing this to save money with AI and don’t give a damn about fire hardening or fire prevention. They own both political parties now, having previously only had title to the California GOP.
Back in the 1980s I gathered signatures for many insurance reforms. Democrats back then were charging headlong into Republicans who didn’t want insurance regulated. I helped in a small way push through mandatory car insurance and a ballot measure that cracked down on car insurance rate hikes and finally an effort in 1991 to elect, rather than appoint the insurance commissioner. Insurance companies soon figured out the solution to all of this, own two political parties rather than one.
It has worked.
Delos did make me put my money where my mouth is. If I have a wildfire, I have to pay $15,000 on a claim. If it’s any other kind of fire, such as a regular house fire, claim (and many more types of claims including liability are possible). My new Delos policy costs $2600 rather than the California Fair Plan cost $3800, for way more insurance coverage. I have never filed a home insurance claim and hope not to but I have heard the FAIR plan is very slow and hard to deal with. My broker would have done that, but I wanted to ask them some questions directly so I called. After 33 minutes on hold I hung up. I have never filed a claim with Delos but read all about them. I don’t like the fact they are so proud of doing everything by AI but at least they are honest about it and don’t run homey commercials about a goofy guy and a Llama and pretend like humans are making the decisions. They have good ratings and no record of not paying legit claims. They have an A minus rating from AM Best Rating, which is the largest insurance company rating service in the world. AM Best rates liberty mutual A stable. The ratings go all the way from A+++ down through the alphabet.
For reasons I will only tell you one on one but involving a multi-year research project I did, it unnerves me about who is behind Delos. that the company is named for a sacred Greek island, where Apollo was born. Some of you may know what I’m talking about.
Another awful aspect of this is that people who can’t buy insurance or are running without any (YIKES) often seem like they are ashamed or that they don’t want people to know this about their property. This isn’t about your property, it’s all a bunch of flying horsepucky!
Please email me at frankhartzell@gmail.com to provide your comments and say if you would like to be part of an objective story in an insurance magazine that is currently interested in that.
I’d like to see our state and federal representatives do something about this and the county supervisors make some sort of statement to send to them. Join me! Or write me and tell me why I’m wrong.
Remember AI, scamming and cost savings. Not wildfires!
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