When a state’s home insurance market is suffering from high prices and a lack of coverage, the political instincts of its officials and candidates are often the same: freeze rates, restrict policy cancellations, or implement government-backed solutions. The impulse is understandable. Residents feel the sting of high prices, and lawmakers feel the pressure to act. But in practice, heavy-handed interventions in insurance markets cause harm just as they do in any other sector—by reducing competition, eliminating coverages, and raising prices elsewhere. The real test of a strong state insurance system is not its power to control insurance rates. It’s whether it can fix the conditions that made the rate high in the first place.

Florida is the prime example of pragmatic reforms. For years, opportunistic lawyers and contractors ran a cottage industry exploiting legal loopholes and suing insurers to collect outsized fees. In 2022, Florida accounted for 9 percent of national homeowners’ insurance claims, but 79 percent of homeowners’ insurance lawsuits—a clear sign the crisis was litigation-driven. Subsequently, insurers went insolvent or ceased operations in Florida, leaving homeowners with higher prices, without coverage, or forced to choose the state-backed insurer.

When the market neared collapse after Hurricane Ian, Florida responded quickly, implementing two major reforms to stop contractors and attorneys profiting from inflated claims. First, they ended “assignment of benefits” on new policies—stopping a practice that let contractors assume a homeowner’s claim and bill the insurer for repairs beyond the actual damage. Second, they eliminated one-way attorney fees, which had forced insurers to cover a plaintiff’s legal costs if the insurance company lost in court. One-way fees had left insurers with no equivalent right if they prevailed and made litigation essentially free to pursue against insurance companies.

Nearly four years later, the results speak for themselves. Florida’s share of lawsuits fell to 40 percent, 21 new insurance carriers entered the market, and roughly 80 percent of Florida counties saw rate decreases. Simultaneously, the state-backed insurer, Citizens, dramatically reduced its enrollees and transferred them to the private market in line with statutory guidance, along with its first rate reduction in over a decade. Meanwhile, auto insurance rates and coverage also saw similar relief from subsequent reforms. None of this required Florida to tell insurers what to charge. It simply let them price according to risk, free from an unfair legal landscape.

Florida’s successes have since been replicated elsewhere to varying degrees. Louisiana, which had a dozen insurer insolvencies, passed reforms in 2024 capping damages to actual economic losses, meaning no more outsized rewards that were causing rates to go up. Baton Rouge also introduced a “cure period,” allowing insurers sixty days to pay residential catastrophic claims in full to avoid unnecessary and costly bad-faith suits. Lawmakers paired that with modest underwriting flexibility, allowing insurers to adjust deductibles and non-renew a limited share of policies.

This restored the underwriting freedom insurers need to price and manage risk responsibly, rather than being locked into policies they can no longer afford to hold. Yet not every reform succeeded, with Governor Jeff Landry vetoing a bill that would have further limited bad-faith lawsuits in a win for trial lawyers. Nonetheless, litigation filings in Louisiana have dropped, and insurers have filed their first rate decrease this decade–slower and more partial than Florida’s turnaround, but still showing reforms work.

North Carolina likely shows where tort reform heads next: ending third-party litigation funding (TPLF). TPLF lets outside investors–often anonymous and with no stake in the underlying dispute–pay a plaintiff’s legal costs for a cut of the settlement, incentivizing prolonged litigation and inflated awards. This abusive practice is increasingly identified as a driver of the “nuclear verdicts” straining property and casualty lines nationally and leading to higher consumer costs. North Carolina became the first state to prohibit commercial TPLF outright, passing the Prohibit Litigation Investments Act with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Legal reforms address a significant part of the insurance cost equation, but the underlying risk itself matters too. In Florida, where risk is high due to nature, mitigation is an effective way to manage risks and costs. Florida’s My Safe Florida Home program offers grants for storm-hardening measures, on the premise that better protected homes are less likely to suffer catastrophic damage, and can therefore be priced more affordably. This is well-supported: research shows six dollars are saved for every one federal dollar put towards mitigation–a pragmatic, cost-saving solution that’s replicable in any state.

Florida proved that fixing the underlying cost drivers, not the price tag, is what lets markets flourish. This is a lesson other states are already putting to use, but not every state needs Florida’s full reform package to see results. Narrower first steps, like Louisiana’s underwriting flexibility or North Carolina’s TPLF ban, can shift the trajectory without much political pushback. Ultimately, the measures that build healthy, competitive markets are the same everywhere—risk mitigation, freedom to price that risk, and a legal system that penalizes bad faith actors without manufacturing incentives for needless litigation. Fix the inputs, and the price takes care of itself.

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