This week, former Florida House Speaker and PACT Board Member Paul Renner took to the airwaves in Florida and across the Country to discuss his latest Miami Herald op-ed highlighting how auto insurance rates are decreasing for the first time in years, following the state’s successful enactment of lawsuit abuse reform legislation.
The Julie Mason Show on SiriusXM POTUS Radio:
MASON: And not reforms to the industry, but reforms to lawsuits.
RENNER: Correct. Yeah. Really getting rid of the lawsuit abuse…And so, we reformed the litigation abuse. I’ll give you a couple of examples… And we got rid of all that. And as a result of that reform, we’re seeing the rates come down.
MASON: So trial lawyers are really trying to undo this, all these changes?
RENNER: They try to undo every bit of it. And so, you know, when you lose your gravy train, you want it back. And so people are starting to figure out that, hey, this is working. It’s good for my pocketbook. And the longer we go, the more that improvement is going to take place and they won’t be able politically to unwind it. So they made a big push this year. Thankfully, the Governor stood strong, the Senate stood strong and didn’t happen. But look, they’ll be back. And so that’s money that consumers are saving. We want to keep that in consumers’ pockets where it belongs and not in the pockets of either the insurance companies or the lawyers.
MASON: So Mr. Speaker, would you say like has the sort of litigation environment broadly changed in Florida, or is it just on this issue?
RENNER: …And this is true for the whole country, not just for Florida. And the reason those rates [across the country] are going up is because those reforms haven’t been made in those other states. And so I think a lot of people are looking at Florida as an example of proof of concept of how we can save our consumers some money.
RENNER: Compare what’s happening in Florida today with what’s happening nationally. And nationally, homeowners insurance is still going up double digits every year. Auto insurance is going up…. In auto and I wrote an op ed just last week on the auto insurance rates in FL, it’s going down six to ten percent. I mean, nothing in America has been going down in the last few years in price. But and while it’s going up six percent nationally, it’s going down six to ten percent here in Florida. That can’t be explained any other way than the fact that we did these [legal abuse] reforms. And I can point you to two particular areas where we’re eliminating the gamesmanship. One is these auto glass claims, and people may or may not know we had eighty thousand of these cases before our reforms, and this year, about seven thousand.
The Drive with Trey Radel on WFSX:
RADEL: You are credited with quite a bit when it comes to these litigation reforms, including ones that lower our auto insurance, which all of it adds up. Can you kind of take us through some of the things that you did, you led as speaker, and perhaps how we can extrapolate that into the future?
RENNER: That first year, first session 2023, insurance went up thirty percent – auto insurance did. So we came in with big reforms, basically, to get rid of litigation abuse….And so we saw this kind of cottage industry of of garbage lawsuits, basically. And when a few people get rich, the rest of us pay the bill. And so we saw these increases. We made these changes, and now auto insurance is down six to ten percent across the state. If your listeners have not seen a cut in their rates, they ought to go shop it because they will. And so we’ve really seen huge progress while the rest of the country’s still going up in price.