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A National Cat Fund: Why?

When Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Miami-Dade County in 1993, it washed away a 100-years' worth of basic assumptions about the threat of hurricanes and the impact they could have on a

By Phil Galewitz | Updated on April 30, 2007

When Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Miami-Dade County in 1993, it washed away a 100-years’ worth of basic assumptions about the threat of hurricanes and the impact they could have on a homeowners’ insurance market. With insurers neglecting to realize the amount of risk being generated by the growth of the population, much of which was migrating to coastal counties, insurers’ rates were sorely inadequate to meet the challenge of absorbing the level of Andrew losses. As a result, insurers were unprepared for the somewhere between $11 billion and $15 billion in losses, which led 11 companies to go under.

For the next several years, the experience of Andrew set in motion a debate as the legislature, regulators, and the industry searched for that fine line between how much risk the private market could realistically bear and what should be the role of government in the insurance market. Spanned by several years with a flurry of property and casualty task forces, and the passage of a number of reform bills, some of the state’s largest insurers–State Farm and Allstate–took the position that hurricanes were uninsurable. That position sent the first wave of lawmakers, insurers, and others to Washington, D.C., to advocate for a national catastrophe fund. While that conversation fell on deaf ears, Florida created its own solution in the form of the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund.

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