Louisiana Homeowners Are Now Paying $6,274 a Year. That's Nearly Triple the National Average.

Louisiana Homeowners Are Now Paying $6,274 a Year. That's Nearly Triple the National Average.

Nancy Reed isn't an outlier anymore — she's becoming the rule. A retired nurse in San Diego, she's been dropped by her longtime carrier, forced onto California's FAIR Plan, and now hunting for supplemental coverage that insurers keep yanking away before renewal. But if you think California's problem is uniquely bad, Louisiana just raised its hand: homeowners there are now paying an average of $6,274 annually for basic home insurance. That's not a typo. That's $2,000 more than the national average of roughly $2,000, and it reflects what happens when an entire state becomes too risky for private insurers to touch.

The five costliest states — Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida, Oklahoma, and Kansas — have all crossed the $4,400 threshold. Between 2017 and 2024, inflation-adjusted premiums rose 28% nationally. But in these states, the math is uglier. Deductibles climbed 22% in 2025 alone. This isn't premium creep. This is a market in structural failure, and Louisiana is the canary.

What makes Louisiana's numbers especially grim: it's not just one catastrophe driving the spike. It's the reinsurance market's collective verdict that coastal and Gulf-adjacent states are now too expensive to insure at any price that customers can actually pay. When reinsurers — the companies that insurers buy protection from — decide a region is uninvestable, primary insurers have only two moves: raise premiums to astronomical levels or exit the state entirely. Louisiana is getting both.

Gobble's Take: If you live in Louisiana, Florida, or coastal Texas, your insurance bill isn't a bug in the system — it's the system working exactly as designed to price you out.

Source: Google News

California Courts Block Expanded FAIR Plan Coverage

In late 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported that a California appeals court had blocked a Department of Insurance regulation that would have required the state's FAIR Plan to offer broader coverage. Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara had pushed the insurer of last resort to add liability and water-damage protections — the kinds of gaps that make a bare-bones fire policy feel very bare indeed.

The court's reasoning was narrow: the FAIR Plan was created in 1968 as a safety net for people who cannot get basic property coverage in the voluntary market, not as a full substitute for a standard homeowners policy. That leaves FAIR Plan customers shopping for supplemental difference-in-conditions coverage in a market the Times described as widely considered dysfunctional.

The scale of the problem had grown sharply by the time of the report. The FAIR Plan had about 160,000 active dwelling policies when Lara issued the original order in 2021; by September 2025, the number had grown to 646,000. Retired nurse Nancy Reed told the Times she had already been dropped by two supplemental carriers and was paying about $2,000 for 12 months of extra coverage.

Gobble's Take: The court protected the FAIR Plan's legal definition. It did not protect the homeowners stuck buying insurance by scavenger hunt.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Three Economists Just Proposed a Federal Rescue. Here's Why It Might Actually Work.

The private reinsurance market has a breaking point. We're hitting it. Inflation-adjusted homeowners' premiums rose 28% nationally between 2017 and 2024. Insurers are exiting markets, FAIR Plans are absorbing more exposure, and catastrophe risk is getting harder for private reinsurers to price without making the whole stack wobble.

That is the backdrop for a proposal from three economists: Benjamin L. Collier of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Benjamin J. Keys of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Philip Mulder, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their idea is a new federal entity called US Re that would sell reinsurance to homeowners' insurers for the most extreme climate-driven events. Not insurance directly to homeowners. Reinsurance for the companies stuck carrying the house-shaped grenade.

The pitch is deliberately narrow. US Re would not replace private insurers or pretend catastrophe risk is cheap. The argument is that the federal government can borrow at lower rates than private reinsurers, so a federal reinsurer of last resort could offer lower and more stable pricing for tail risks while still pricing contracts against expected losses and administrative costs.

That last caveat matters. The authors are trying to avoid the National Flood Insurance Program trap: political pressure, underpriced risk, and debt that becomes everybody's problem. Whether Congress could actually keep its hands off the pricing lever is the live wire in the room.

Gobble's Take: The proposal is basically a federal firebreak for the reinsurance market. Useful, maybe. Politically flammable, definitely.

Source: Insurance Business

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• SpaceX's Rocket Tests Are Cracking Walls in South Texas — and 80 Homeowners Want to Know Who Pays
• State Farm Left. Then Allstate. Then Eight More. Here's the Map of Where Private Insurance Is Vanishing.
• California's FAIR Plan Was a Trickle Valve. Now It's Holding Back a Dam.