The Los Angeles fires have cast uncertainty over when the insurance crisis buffeting the entire state will ease, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara told the Chronicle during an interview Saturday in Santa Monica, where he was attending a workshop for wildfire survivors.
Asked whether a slate of reforms that his office just pushed through would still bring relief this year, as he had previously anticipated, Lara said, “I don’t know now, because … my greatest fear was that we were going to have a catastrophe of this nature.”
The reforms took effect across California at the beginning of this year. They include two provisions that insurers have urgently sought: allowing forward-looking catastrophe models (rather than relying simply on what happened in previous disasters) to help price risk in an era of climate change and big-budget catastrophes; and allowing insurers to factor the cost of reinsurance — insurance for insurers — into customer prices…