SACRAMENTO, California — Five insurance companies are asking for rate hikes under California’s new insurance rules, a move that could help more homeowners get coverage in wildfire-prone areas.
What happened: Mercury, CSAA, USAA, Pacific Specialty and California Casualty have all filed for 6.9 percent rate increases in recent months under new rules that require them to write a minimum share of policies in fire-prone areas and incorporate the risks of climate change in their modeling.
What this means: The filings show that at least some insurers are willing to participate in California’s insurance market, which saw most of its top property insurers stop or slow new policies in the past few years in part because of the increase of wildfire risk.
Gov. Gavin Newsom highlighted the filings in a Wednesday conversation with former President Bill Clinton in New York City, saying the companies had “come back” to the market, although none of the five companies had stopped writing policies in the state.
