"Batten down the
hatches" may carry far greater meaning this summer and fall for
Southern Florida residents as fewer and fewer insurers offer coverage
for wind damage from hurricanes.
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Over the course of the next year, USAA will exclude wind damages in home insurance policies in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties as they come up for renewal.
USAA
will join three of the other top three Florida home insurers — State
Farm Florida Insurance Co., Allstate Floridian Insurance Co., and First
Floridian Auto & Home Insurance Co. — in refusing to offer
windstorm insurance in South Florida. "We're one of the last insurers to make this move," says
Lynne McChristian of USAA. The company had not sold new home insurance
policies that included hurricane protection in South Florida since 1996
and this change extends that practice to existing customers, she says. Consumers will be forced to seek hurricane insurance from
the pricier Florida Windstorm Underwriting Association (FWUA), the
hurricane insurer of last resort in South Florida. According
to the state's Department of Insurance, 18 percent of Florida
residents, representing 2.1 million people, report that they have no health insurance, and of those, more than half say they haven't had health insurance in at least two years.
In
most cases economic reasons are cited — consumers have lost jobs and
are unable to afford private health care, or they consider the
tribulations of dealing with health insurance not worth the cost. The uninsured are heavily concentrated in certain regions
of the state, where they are putting significant stress on safety net
hospitals and clinics, according to the Agency for Health Care
Administration (AHCA). The administration's 1999 report on Florida
health insurance finds that Miami, where there is a large Hispanic
population, has the highest rate of uninsured. Hispanics are also more
likely than other minorities to be uninsured in the state: 28.6 percent
compared to 19.6 percent of African Americans. In addition, AHCA says that the type of job a person has
can determine whether or not they have health insurance. Those working
in agriculture, construction, and retail are all less likely to have
insurance. Those who work in companies with fewer than 10 employees are
five times as likely to be uninsured.
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