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REPORT COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IN REPLY
Message Subject FL State lawmakers to vote on eliminating sinkhole coverage
Poster Handle Anonymous Coward
Post Content
Sinkholes a new frontier of fraud

By Fred Grimm
[email protected]

We think small. Mostly, we’re content to fake car wrecks.

Not that South Florida, led by Miami and Hialeah, doesn’t do a bang-up job staging bang-ups. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, South Florida ranks second in the nation among metropolitan regions prone to collecting insurance claims for phantom injuries in auto accidents that never occurred. The report speaks to a certain theatrical flair endemic to South Florida’s brand of insurance fraud. (Lending new relevance to the old stage expression, “break a leg.”)

But for sheer audacity, we’ve got nothing on those nice folks up in central Florida, whose insurance claims suggest the whole damn region is being sucked, homes and all, down into the very bowels of the earth.

Geologists insist they’ve noticed no particular increase in geological activity. No sudden burst of chasms, fissures, dents, voids, cavities thereabouts. Yet it was as if homeowners of Hernando, Pasco and Hillsborough counties (affectionately known among insurance adjusters as “sinkhole alley”) were living through some real life disaster movie.

The earth did not move. No more than usual. Yet since 2006, the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation has been beset with sinkhole claims. In Hernando, according to a Florida senate report issued in December, sinkhole claims have risen 375 percent, in Pasco by 187 percent, in Hillsborough by 384 percent.

We wouldn’t mind so much in South Florida (having a rather tenuous perch on the moral high ground when it comes to insurance fraud), except the state-run Citizens has also become our flimsy provider-of-last-resort for windstorm insurance. It comes as something of a shock to discover that although we’ve been bypassed by major hurricanes since 2005, our pricey public-run catastrophic insurance company has become engulfed in a financial sinkhole. Citizens now pays out about four times more in sinkhole claims than it receives in premiums.

Read more: [link to www.miamiherald.com]
 
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