The Candidate Pitching Single-Payer—for Disaster Insurance

If you go down the expansive California ballot for the June 2 primary, you will eventually hit the election for state insurance commissioner. The position, which oversees the insurance market for homeowner’s, automotive, business, workers’ compensation, medical malpractice, bail, and other insurance products—but not health insurance, which is almost entirely managed by another agency—is only elected in 11 states, and only in California since a 1988 ballot measure named Prop 103. The time and energy spent by voters on insurance commissioner elections likely trends toward zero.

But that shouldn’t be the case this year. It may be the most important race on the ballot, in fact.

Like many states in an era of more frequent and destructive natural disasters, California is immersed in a homeowner’s insurance crisis. While the state doesn’t require this coverage for homeowners, many lenders won’t issue a mortgage without it. Yet that insurance has become harder to get, and even with it, claims payouts are not always guaranteed. Serial claims delays for the wildfires in Los Angeles County by State Farm, which insures 1 out of every 5 homes in California, has led the Department of Insurance to pursue legal action and potentially suspend State Farm’s license.

But State Farm hasn’t written new policies in California since 2023 and has non-renewed thousands of policies in high-risk parts of the state. That’s part of a trend across the industry, with policy cancellations an ever-present fear. And it signifies the core problem: The remaining insurers have so much leverage in a concentrated market that they can demand rate increases or leniency for claims obstruction as a condition for writing state policies. They are asserting a right to rip homeowners off.

Most of the 11 insurance commissioner candidates this year (including state lawmakers Steve Bradford and Ben Allen, businessman Patrick Wolff, and the lone prominent Republican, insurance agent Stacy Korsgaden) are vowing to crack down on foot-dragging on claims and improving policyholder education about their rights. But they also lead with talk of “stabilizing” the insurance market, mainly by bringing in new companies to write policies and allowing for faster approval of rate changes. That’s code for agreeing to the industry’s terms: Let us charge more or we walk. That puts the primary burden for more affordable policies on individuals, through conducting fire resistance retrofits, cutting down nearby flammable trees and underbrush, and so forth. But though many Californians have done this, including through a state incentive program, they have not seen any change in their insurance rates.

One candidate is thinking differently about this, through the lens of market structure. Jane Kim, the state director of the Working Families Party and a former county supervisor in San Francisco, is running on the concept of a single-payer system for over-the-top disaster insurance. Critics and opponents have issued hyperbolic warnings that this would destroy home insurance in the state. But the concept comes out of New Zealand and other countries where it has been relatively successful. And it could offer a way out of the current hostage situation between Californians and their insurers.

KIM WAS EXPECTING TO SPEND THIS YEAR getting the Working Families Party involved in its first gubernatorial campaign since launching in California in 2022. “But we kept going down the ballot and we got fixated on insurance commissioner, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she told me in an interview at a teriyaki shop near LAX Airport. “Wealth inequality, economic equity, climate justice are all intertwined in this office in a really interesting way.”

Insurance companies should be natural allies to climate advocates just as a matter of financial incentives. Minimizing natural disasters would save insurers money. But in reality, insurance companies make their money by investing premiums before paying out claims, and much of that investment portfolio is tied up in the fossil fuel industry.

So the way insurers manage risk, Kim explains, is by pricing it, which translates into higher monthly payments or canceled policies. “It was probably true in the 1970s, that competition [in home insurance] leads to lower rates,” she said. “Now with climate disaster, the competition is not to lower rates, the competition is to actually cancel coverage on as many risky homes as quickly as you can.” She noted that Texas, despite having effectively no regulation of the insurance industry and a multitude of underwriters practicing, has much higher home insurance rates than California. “It’s just to me mind-boggling, the argument that if you take away protections for consumers, the industry will do a better job.”

The assumption is that insurers are flying out of California and other parts of the country because providing insurance is a losing proposition. But the Federal Insurance Office’s latest report in 2025 shows that the property and casualty industry has experienced double-digit growth in written premiums for three years, and more than doubled net earnings last year, enjoying a return on average equity of 15.9 percent, the highest in a decade. The report cited “strong gains in profitability.” The leading 20 property and casualty insurers reported $69 billion in net income in 2025, up 29 percent year over year. And California plays host to 1 out of every 8 homeowners. There’s money to be made.

Kim’s strategy to spring Californians from the trap the insurance industry has stuck them in is modeled on New Zealand. That country offers public natural disaster insurance, run by the government, as a first layer of coverage for the property in the event of specific events like earthquakes or volcano activity. The government plan covers structural rebuilding but not home contents; anything outside of scope is covered by the private market. France and Spain also have this over-the-top disaster coverage.

California has some entities that resemble this bifurcation but with key weaknesses. For instance, the California Earthquake Authority offers coverage for that specific disaster, but it’s privately run despite being publicly created, and earthquake insurance is not mandatory to get a mortgage, so many go without it. In addition, in the 1960s the state inaugurated FAIR, a guaranteed insurer of last resort for uninsured homeowners that solely offers minimal fire coverage, which is required for mortgages. This is also privately run, with (predictably) very high premiums and claims spread out across all insurers. While intended to be a bridge to more comprehensive coverage, FAIR has become a landing point for hundreds of thousands, leaving those homeowners unprotected from most insurable events other than fire.

Kim’s idea would be to have every homeowner automatically get over-the-top government disaster coverage as part of their home insurance. Premiums would be contoured to property values and risk, and there would only be one risk pool. “What we’re proposing in a single-payer system is that every homeowner who gets insurance would be in one program,” she said.

Much like single-payer health insurance, Kim envisions savings from the nonprofit structure, with no pressure to leak out profits to shareholders or executives and no overhead for marketing. Premium revenue would be investable, and California could use it to bolster renewable energy or other climate-resilient industries. It could also offer financial incentives to policyholders to lower fire and earthquake risk, or invest in state mitigation strategies like controlled burns and firefighting capacity. The hope is that this would lead to fewer claims, aligning incentives between homeowners and insurers.

Many have freaked out about this idea. The Orange County Register claimed it would “destroy California’s market.” But Kim says that it would benefit state insurers by taking one of their biggest costs off their hands. New entrants would see a market where they aren’t responsible for home rebuilding after a fire or earthquake. For existing insurers, “if anything, we’re letting them off the hook after we’ve been paying premiums for decades,” Kim said. “There should be a discussion for how to do this appropriately, whether there’s some kind of exit fee for allowing them to go out of business on a risky part of their portfolio.”

The insurance commissioner would not be able to mandate a public program of this type on their own; the legislature would have to establish it. But winning the election, Kim believes, would give her a platform to organize around changing the home insurance market. Her experience passing legislation on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and organizing with the Working Families Party offers a road map. “Because of the ambitious nature of our agenda, I am very aware of how this office can galvanize Californians to engage,” she said. “I believe that the only way to pass some of the bigger ideas that we have is with public pressure and scrutiny.”

That doesn’t stop at the single-payer disaster insurance system. Kim wants to put a definitive loss ratio on insurers mandating that they pay a certain percentage of premiums out in claims (65 percent for homeowner’s insurance, 70 percent for auto insurance) or else refund customers the balance to hit the ratio. (This exists in health insurance at the federal level and is called the medical loss ratio; Kim believes the insurance commissioner has existing authority to implement this.) She wants to expand an existing public option for car insurance that is offered to low-income drivers with good records, but that is practically unknown to most state residents. She wants to require six months for any changes in coverage to let homeowners prepare for non-renewal. She wants to freeze rates for a period of time when people file a claim, so that insurers cannot essentially charge people for trying to use their insurance.

Ultimately, the office is a consumer protection agency, an area of policy that has been bolstered in the state by the hiring of former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra as head of the Business and Consumer Services Agency. Kim and others in the race want to mandate immediate payouts for contents after total losses rather than forcing itemization, conduct more examinations of bad actors, and provide transparency on how premium money is being spent and how insurers are performing on claims.

“I’ve talked to claim adjusters who believe that anywhere from $1.7 to $3 billion is stolen from Californians every year in claims that these insurers are contractually obligated to pay,” she said. “Why is that not considered the biggest theft? I’m paying for a service, and the moment I need that service … they do everything they can to not actually provide the service.”

Handicapping this election would be a fool’s task, but Kim has support from the Working Families Party (naturally) and endorsements from several labor unions and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). So depending on the results, we could get a test of a radical rethinking of insurance, who it should serve, and how public provision can upend the usual corporate stickup.