Texas Watch—Consumer Protection. Corporate Accountability. Citizen Advocacy.

With governments everywhere moving much of the people’s business online for easy accessibility, the Texas Insurance Department has taken a big step in the opposite direction.

Until September, the department, which promises to protect insurance customers, publicly released the names of insurance companies and agents who violated state rules. The September announcement, for example, noted that Great American Assurance Co. was fined $195,000 for failure to file policy forms or endorsements containing property and casualty benefits and that the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association failed to process claims in a timely manner or pay claims for storm damage that is a covered loss. Information on violators was also available in the department’s newsletter, TDInSight.

No longer.

Less than two months after Gov. Rick Perry appointed Eleanor Kitzman state insurance commissioner, the department abandoned its longtime practice of naming names. The information is now available, but with some heavy strings attached. You have to write and ask for it.

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Alex Winslow, whose group Texas Watch monitors the Insurance Department, said Kitzman’s “job is to police the insurance industry and look out for the interests of policyholders. And if she’s sweeping these disciplinary actions under the rug, she’s doing the exact opposite. She’s covering the backsides of unscrupulous agents and insurance companies.”

Why is this information important?

“From a consumer’s point of view,” Winslow said, “that information must be public and must be available so that insurance customers know what they’re dealing with, whether it’s an unscrupulous agent or a company with a pattern of unfair claims practices. This is key information that insurance customers need when they’re making a decision about what agent and what insurance company to use, and how they’re going to spend their hard-earned money.”

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is locked in a fight with the state’s largest insurer over the company’s decision not to renew 11,000 residential and commercial property insurance policies along the Gulf coast.

Abbott’s office requested documents last month from State Farm to make sure the insurer lawfully terminated the contracts, Tom Kelley, a spokesman for Abbott, said in an email.

State Farm responded late last week by filing a lawsuit to prevent the attorney general’s office from getting the information it requested.

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Alex Winslow, executive director of the advocacy group Texas Watch, said he wants to know more about State Farm’s decision not to renew the coastal policies.

“State Farm should not be allowed to just tuck tail and run without any explanation. So, a full investigation is warranted,” Winslow said in a statement.

“The public deserves to know just what State Farm is up to and what the company’s decisions mean for families and small businesses, including the company’s network of insurance agents.”

Read More: Austin American-Statesman

As weather disasters strike with more frequency, homeowners first get hit with the destruction or total loss of property. Many are then hit with the unexpected loss of homeowners insurance policies as insurance companies re-evaluate their financial liabilities.

After a tornado ripped through Springfield, Massachusetts, last year, R. Paula Lazzari’s home was badly damaged. The retired teacher found broken windows, missing siding and a damaged roof. Her insurer offered to fund repairs for one broken window and some of the siding. It took nine months — and mediation services from an independent adjuster and the Massachusetts Division of Insurance — to get her bills paid, according to the parties involved.

In this era of unpredictable weather patterns, Lazzari’s case is not unique. Insurance companies are raising rates, cutting coverage, balking at some payouts and generally shifting more expense and liability to homeowners, according to reports from the industry and its critics.

“Insurance companies have significantly and methodically decreased their financial responsibility for weather catastrophes like hurricanes, tornados and floods in recent years,” the Consumer Federation of America said in a statement after studying industry data.

Read More: Reuters

Texas representative Craig Eiland is looking for ways to put the brakes on insurance companies that want to abandon areas of the state.

“If (Texas Commissioner of Insurance Eleanor Kitzman) doesn’t have the tools (to stop this,) she needs to let the legislature know what she needs so that we can curb this kind of behavior,” he said.

What raised Eiland’s ire was a State Farm Insurance Company decision to cancel 11,278 homeowners’ policies.

“This isn’t a case where they don’t write a policy for wind damage because there is an exposure to a hurricane,” Eiland said. “They aren’t going to write policies for burglary, fire or theft, either.”

Read More: The Galveston Daily News

If you were to apply for a car loan, a bank would review your repayment history, not whether you could parallel park without dinging another vehicle. But if you want insurance, a poor credit history could cost you dearly, even if you’re a good driver or responsible homeowner.

Now, if you’re wondering what credit history has to do with insurance premiums, you’re not alone. Credit scoring isn’t new, but it’s taking on a troublingly larger role in determining insurance premiums for autos and homes.

A poor credit report, on average, now costs Texas consumers 42 percent more on home and auto policies, according to a Dallas Morning News analysis of insurance industry data published Sunday. In 2009, when the newspaper conducted the same analysis, the gap was 35 percent.

Read More: The Dallas Morning News

Tornadoes have ripped through North Texas, destroying homes and upending thousands of lives. Here are some tips for families and policyholders when dealing with their insurance company. Read More »

When we purchase insurance, we’re buying a promise on a piece of paper. We uphold our end of the bargain by paying our hard-earned dollars for premiums, and we expect that insurers will uphold their end by paying our claims if tragedy strikes. Too often, however, insurers betray the trust of vulnerable policyholders. Not content to just profit off of the gains they reap when they invest our premiums – using our money to fund their stock portfolio – insurers have turned claims into an additional profit center by using “delay, deny, and defend” tactics. These bad faith practices are an illegitimate and illegal way for insurance carriers to pick their policyholders’ pockets. Read More »

AUSTIN — North Texas homeowners with poor credit ratings — including a high percentage of minorities and lower-income residents — are seeing their premiums climb as insurers sharply increase their reliance on credit history in pricing home insurance policies.

A Dallas Morning News analysis of sample rates filed by top insurers with the Texas Department of Insurance indicate that credit ratings alone are forcing many homeowners to pay an average of 42 percent more than those with good credit — even when all other factors, such as damage or theft claims, are identical.

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“Credit is extended on a promise to repay, while insurance is a product you pay for upfront. If you don’t pay the premiums upfront, you don’t get insurance,” said Alex Winslow of Texas Watch, a consumer group active in insurance issues.

Winslow argued that using credit ratings to decide how much a consumer should pay for insurance is “fatally flawed.”

“It doesn’t make sense that insurance companies set rates based on whether somebody is late on their credit card payments. You’re not more likely to have your house hit by a tornado just because you’re late on credit card payments,” he said.

Read More: The Dallas Morning News (subscription required)

Rep. Craig Eiland (D-Galveston) who serves as the Vice Chairman of the House Committee on Insurance sat down with the Texas Commissioner of Insurance, Eleanor Kitzman, to discuss several issues including his concerns of State Farm cancelling 11,278 policies along the Texas coast in Galveston, Brazoria, Chambers, Jefferson and Orange Counties. At that time, he hand delivered a letter expressing his concerns and asking that the Texas Department of Insurance:

1) make recommendations before next session of legislature that coastal and/or other legislators could sponsor and give the Texas Department of Insurance the tools it needs to prevent and/or punish this type of abusive policyholder activity;

2) place a data call on State Farm to determine how many of the policyholders who have their home, life and auto through State Farm, who will now be forced to at least obtain their homeowners elsewhere, the potential impact this could have upon life insurance policies, and/or ability to obtain new multi-line discounts from other carriers.

3) track the claims data for all 11,278 of these policies to determine which ones of them end up in TWIA or the FAIR Plan and what their subsequent loss histories are to determine if any of those losses were caused by State Farm’s claims practices before dumping these policyholders on TWIA and the FAIR Plan.

Read More: The Anahuac Progress