Business
L.A. consumer group calls FAIR Plan insurance reforms an industry 'bailout'
A new law that could force homeowners across California to cover billions of dollars of insurer losses caused by a catastrophic wildfire is generating pushback from a leading consumer group, which has called it an industry “bailout.”
State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced Friday he had reached an agreement with the California FAIR Plan that would allow losses suffered by the state’s insurer of last resort to be recouped by surcharges on residential and commercial insurance policies statewide in an “extreme worst case scenario.”
The FAIR Plan, which insures property owners who cannot get or afford traditional policies, is backed by licensed insurers such as State Farm and Allstate. As the program is structured, they are on the hook to pay claims if the FAIR Plan runs through its reserves, reinsurance and catastrophe bonds.
Under Lara’s agreement, if that happens and those insurers suffer large losses, they could seek to be reimbursed by their own policyholders. The deal allow insurers that are assessed by the FAIR Plan to cover up to $1 billion in residential losses and up to $1 billion in commercial losses to ask the insurance commissioner to allow them to surcharge their policyholders for half of the assessed amounts. They also could seek surcharges on policyholders for 100% of losses that exceed those limits. Homeowners would not be surcharged for commercial losses.
“It’s outrageous and outside the law for the insurance commissioner to force consumers to bail out home insurance companies and then call that consumer protection,” said Carmen Balber, executive director of Los Angeles-based Consumer Watchdog.
Gabriel Sanchez, Lara’s press secretary, defended the agreement, saying, “It would be easy to listen to the elites and the entrenched interests defending a system that clearly isn’t working. Commissioner Lara is focused on hearing from the public, following the data and creating realistic, long-lasting solutions for everyone in this state.”
The FAIR Plan assessment is the latest element of Lara’s Sustainable Insurance Strategy, a package of executive actions intended to stabilize the California market, which has seen insurers stop writing new policies and decline to renew existing policies amid a sharp increase in claims for wildfires damage.
Just this week, firefighters are battling the massive Park fire in Butte, Tehama and Shasta counties, where 100 structures have been destroyed, 4,200 were threatened and 26,000 people were forced to evacuate as of Monday. It is the sixth-largest fire in state history.
As insurers have pulled back from high-fire risk neighborhoods, the number of residential FAIR Plan policies has more than doubled since 2019 to about 408,000 as of June. Commercial policies similarly increased to 11,026.
The FAIR Plan has a market share under 4%. Policyholders are concentrated in canyons, hillsides and other high-risk neighborhoods, vulnerable to fire and catastrophic insurance losses. The plan’s loss exposure was $393 billion as of June, even though the plan’s policies are more limited than those available through the regular commercial market.
Lara said Friday in a release announcing the agreement that “modernizing the FAIR Plan is a crucial step in our strategy to stabilize California’s insurance market.”
The FAIR Plan’s financial risk is overwhelmingly due to its residential policies, which account for about 95% of its $393 billion in total loss exposure, according to the insurer.
The Insurance Department downplayed a worst-case scenario, noting that even the 2018 Camp fire in Butte County that ravaged the town of Paradise, destroying or damaging more than 19,000 structures and causing some $16.5 billion in damage, did not deplete the FAIR Plan‘s reserves.
The Insurance Department contended that the agreement was actually favorable to consumers because under current law there is nothing prohibiting the insurers from seeking policyholder assessments on all FAIR Plan losses they must cover.
“The agreement … requires insurance companies to share the burden, something not clearly outlined before. That protects consumers by providing predictability which leads to stability,” Sanchez said.
Balber disputed that reading of the law and said Lara has not been able to get legislative authority for the insurer policyholder assessments, so he proceeded under questionable executive authority. “We have several questions about the legality of this proposal and are looking into it,” she said.
Consumer Watchdog has called for requiring insurers to offer policies in wildfire-prone neighborhoods to homeowners who have taken steps to reduce fire risks on their property as the best method to reduce enrollment in the FAIR Plan and stabilize the state’s insurance market.
Another key element of Lara’s FAIR Plan reforms call for the insurer to offer greater commercial coverage — up to $20 million per structure and $100 million for any one location.
Dan Dunmoyer, chief executive of the California Building Industry Assn., said the trade group has been seeking higher commercial coverage limits due to the rise of insurance premiums, which have slowed the construction of condominium complexes that builders insure.
He estimated that astronomical insurance rate increases have slowed condo construction by about 70% in the last 12 months, with fewer than 6,000 units built.
“Our view on this is: Get some competition in the marketplace, expand commercial coverage, let us build the most affordable for sale homes in California, which are condos,” he said.
The American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., an industry trade group, called Lara’s plan “an important step toward restoring the FAIR Plan’s financial stability and ensuring consumers have access to the coverage they need.”
The deal reached by Lara with the FAIR Plan is a binding legal stipulation and it requires the insurer to develop a “Plan of Operation” within 30 days detailing how it will carry out the agreement. It has 120 days to submit a rate plan for offering the higher commercial coverage.
The FAIR Plan was sued last week by four California residents who claim its policies offer subpar coverage for fire and smoke damage. The proposed class-action lawsuit seeks to represent more than 300,000 of the plan’s residential policyholders. The plan also is facing a lawsuit from more than 1,000 homeowners in Los Angeles who say the plan wrongly denied their claims.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
A former female staffer who worked for Beast Industries, the media venture behind the popular YouTube channel MrBeast, is suing the company, alleging she was sexually harassed and fired shortly after she returned from maternity leave.
The employee, Lorrayne Mavromatis, a Brazilian-born social media professional, alleges in a lawsuit she was subjected to sexual harassment by the company’s management and demoted after she complained about her treatment. She said she was urged to join a conference call while in labor and expected to work during her maternity leave in violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, according to the federal complaint filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
“This clout-chasing complaint is built on deliberate misrepresentations and categorically false statements, and we have the receipts to prove it. There is extensive evidence — including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony — that unequivocally refutes her claims. We will not submit to opportunistic lawyers looking to manufacture a payday from us,” Gaude Paez, a Beast Industries spokesperson, said in a statement.
Jimmy Donaldson, 27, began MrBeast as a teen gaming channel that soon exploded into a media company worth an estimated $5 billion, with 500 employees and 450 million subscribers who watch its games, stunts and giveaways.
Mavromatis, who was hired in 2022 as its head of Instagram, described a pervasive climate of discrimination and harassment, according to the lawsuit.
In her complaint, she alleges the company’s former CEO James Warren made her meet him at his home for one-on-one meetings while he commented on her looks and dismissed her complaints about a male client’s unwanted advances, telling her “she should be honored that the client was hitting on her.”
When Mavromatis asked Warren why MrBeast, Donaldson, would not work with her, she was told that “she is a beautiful woman and her appearance had a certain sexual effect on Jimmy,” and, “Let’s just say that when you’re around and he goes to the restroom, he’s not actually using the restroom.”
Paez refuted the claim.
“That’s ridiculous. This is an allegation fabricated for the sole purpose of sparking headlines,” Paez said.
Mavromatis said she endured a slate of other indignities such as being told by Donaldson that she “would only participate in her video shoot if she brought him a beer.”
“In this male-centric workplace, Plaintiff, one of the few women in a high-level role, was excluded from otherwise all-male meetings, demeaned in front of colleagues, harassed, and suffered from males be given preferential treatment in employment decisions,” states the complaint.
When Mavromatis raised a question during a staff meeting with her team, she said a male colleague told her to “shut up” or “stop talking.”
At MrBeast headquarters in Greenville, N.C., she said male executives mocked female contestants participating in BeastGames, “who complained they did not have access to feminine hygiene products and clean underwear while participating in the show.”
In November 2023, Mavromatis formally complained about “the sexually inappropriate encounters and harassment, and demeaning and hostile work environment she and other female employees had been living and experiencing working at MrBeast,” to the company’s then head of human resources, Sue Parisher, who is also Donaldson’s mother, according to the suit.
In her complaint, Mavromatis said Beast Industries did not have a method or process for employees to report such issues either anonymously or to a third party, rather employees were expected to follow the company’s handbook, “How to Succeed In MrBeast Production.”
In it, employees were instructed that, “It’s okay for the boys to be childish,” “if talent wants to draw a dick on the white board in the video or do something stupid, let them” and “No does not mean no,” according to the complaint.
Mavromatis alleges that she was demoted and then fired.
Paez said that Mavromatis’s role was eliminated as part of a reorganization of an underperforming group within Beast Industries and that she was made aware of this.
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