BATON ROUGE — Commercial businesses with property insurance from Louisiana Citizens will have another option soon.
Gov. Jeff Landry announced Monday that Property Insurance Company of America is willing to provide policies for all the commercial customers now covered by Louisiana Citizens, the state’s insurer of last resort.
Landry said the policies will cost between 15 percent and 40 percent less than comparable policies from Citizens.
Landry indicated that the removal of commercial policies from Citizens may allow reduction to homeowner policy costs.
He touted the development as a consequence of work he, the insurance commissioner and the legislature have done over several years.
PICA’s willingness to take on all the commercial policies now held by Citizens is different from other efforts to get customers out of the highest-risk – and thus most expensive – policies.
“What normally happens is companies come in, they look through it. They select through it. They cherry-pick,” Landry said.
That leaves the highest-risk policies with Citizens, he said.
State Sen. Kirk Talbot, R- River Ridge, who chairs the Senate Insurance Committee, joined Landry for the announcement.
Talbot said the governor and Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple had worked well with lawmakers to improve the landscape for property insurance in Louisiana. Catastrophic storms setting damage records have caused some insurers to pull out of the Louisiana market.
“It was a great bipartisan effort between the executive branch and the legislative branch, and the House and the Senate, Republicans, Democrats. And this is a result of that,” Talbot said. “We have companies coming in, fighting for policyholders now. How foreign to that, to our ears, is that? Before, it was lucky just to get a quote. Now we have companies that are trying to poach policyholders off of other companies to try to to lower their prices and do it that way, and this is a result of that.”
Landry said that the commercial policies that could be affected number in the hundreds or possibly in the thousands.
“It’s substantial,” he said.
Landry said commercial customers who are happy with their coverage from Citizens can keep it.
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