LaPolitics: Gov. Jeff Landry says he is taking a “balanced approach” to insurance reform. What is your take on how that’s working out?
House Insurance Chair Gabe Firment: I would rather talk about the House’s package. I think the House’s package represents a balanced approach as well. I think you’ve got a good balance of legal reform, and then you’ve also got several bills that are clearly consumer friendly, like my House Bill 438, the insurer advertising bill. You’ve got the bill by Rep. Troy Hebert that deals with lapses in coverage and essentially gives a grace lapse to consumers, and the bill by Rep. Rodney Schamerhorn that provides the premium discount for commercial vehicles with dashboard cameras and telematics. So, I think our package is balanced.
What do you consider the most important bills of the House package?
I would not characterize any single bill as a must-pass, but I will say that from my perspective, the five most critical bills in this order would be HB431 by Rep. Emily Chenevert, HB435 by Rep. Peter Egan, HB434 by Rep. Jason DeWitt, HB450 by Rep. Michael Melerine, and HB34 by Rep. Brian Glorioso. So for me, those are really the key bills and again, I’m not going to make a blanket statement that every single one of them has to pass, but I certainly think we would need four out of five.
Are you prepared to take responsibility if the package passes and rates don’t come down?
You will not hear me guarantee that rates would go down. The only guarantee I’m comfortable making is that if we pass this package of bills, it would make us more attractive to insurance companies, it would reduce cost, and I would expect that after two or three years, Louisiana would not be the most expensive state in the nation for auto insurance. I think we could expect fairly quickly after passing this package that conditions would improve on the commercial side where in some sectors like logging, towing and trucking, we may only have two or three carriers at most even writing in Louisiana. So, I think we could expect pretty quickly more commercial underwriters coming into the market.
What else would you like to highlight about what you’re working on this session?
I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media that the Legislature has forgotten about property insurance, but that is not the case. I’ve got HB437, which is property oriented. We’ve gotten feedback from the reinsurance market that one reform they would like to see is for insurance companies to be able to require a proof of loss payment, and that’s what HB437 does. Some other provisions are to prevent homeowners from predatory contractors and things like that. We’ve got several bills that deal with the fortified roof program, which in the long term, building more resilient structures is going to be the key to sustainability.
—They said: “This system is not designed to work.” –Rep. Mike Bayham, during committee debate about Senate Bill 20, a constitutional amendment that would expand the number of general bills legislators can file during a fiscal session from five to seven
