Free Republic

Americans’ auto-insurance rates are rising rapidly because President Joe Biden’s migration policy puts millions of new migrants on the road, often without driver training or English language lessons. Federal data shows that monthly auto insurance rates rose by roughly 8.3 percent under President Donald Trump, but by 20 percent under President Joe Biden and his pro-immigration vice President, Kamala Harris. That 20 percent jump adds up to an annual $500 “tax” on Americans’ pocketbooks. PPI industry data for Direct property and casualty insurers–Private passenger auto insurance, not seasonally adjusted (Bureau of Labor Statistics)Since 2021, Biden has imported roughly 10 million...

CNN — The rollout of updated Covid-19 vaccines has begun in the United States, but for the first time, the shots will no longer be free of charge for people without insurance at their local pharmacy. Earlier in the pandemic, vaccines were purchased by the federal government and free for everyone. Last year, as the shots transitioned to the commercial market, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bridge Access Program provided free Covid-19 vaccines to adults without insurance and those whose insurance didn’t cover all vaccine costs. The program ended last month due to lack of federal funding....

Health insurance rates in New York are set to rise significantly in 2025, with individual plans increasing by an average of 12.7% and small-group plans by 8.4%, according to state records. These increases, though lower than the nearly 17% and 19% hikes insurers initially sought, will affect about 1 million New Yorkers enrolled in these plans. State officials cited the rising costs of medical care, including hospital stays and drug prices, as the primary drivers behind the rate hikes. The approved rates aim to limit insurers’ profit margins to 1% to mitigate inflationary pressures on consumers. The rate increases for...

Americans are having a hard time finding the “joy” and “hope” that Democrat elites touted during their August convention, as they struggle to pay their bills while the cost of goods skyrockets. This includes car insurance prices, which, under Vice President Kamala Harris’s watch, rose 54 percent. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a dramatic rise in car insurance since President Joe Biden and Harris, the latter of whom Democrats have coronated to face off against former President Donald Trump, took office. From January 2021 to July 2024, car insurance rose a tremendous 54 percent. This is just...

Today I received a letter of cancellation of our commercial insurance based on a "virtual inspection of property". The letter also stated that I could request a hearing before the Insurance Division of the State of Oregon "for the purpose of establishing the existence of the proof or evidence for the reason given for the cancellation." They do not explain what their "virtual inspection" is comprised of, but no person contacted us or made an inperson walk through or walk around our place of business. I am further suspicious because their one paragraph inspection report states "Exterior walls of building...

Canisteo, N.Y. (WHAM)— Steuben County residents are speaking out for the first time after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced emergency cash funding for families over the weekend. Canisteo residents who spoke with 13WHAM say they were promised funds after damaging floods brought by remnants of Debby hit their town last week. But now, they are discovering they do not qualify. William Weakland and his neighbor, Kate Bowie, are both staying with relatives after flooding took their homes. "Everyone that was there was extremely sympathetic, and their promises felt sincere," Weakland said. "We got out the front door got in the truck...

Hurricane Debby left billions of dollars of damage in its wake as it moved across the southeastern U.S. last week — losses made all the more devastating because so many of them may have been uninsured. More than three-quarters of the houses damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Debby were in regions where flood insurance isn’t required, a new report from nonprofit First Street Foundation has found. That’s because nearly $10 billion of the slow-moving storm’s estimated $12.3 billion in damage happened in regions outside the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) designated Flood Zones. FEMA’s flood maps dictate where homeowners are...

Florida's largest insurer has requested a 13.5 percent rate hike but says it needs a nearly 93 percent increase to match the competitive market. Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is currently requesting a more modest hike from the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation (OIR) because state regulations cap the amount rates can increase annually. Brian Donovan, Citizens' chief actuary, said in a hearing last week that this would increase the average price of homeowners multi-peril policies, the insurer's most common type of policy, from $3,560 to $4,041.

The percentage of uninsured Americans rose to 8.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to survey findings published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Aug. 6.The report estimated that 27.1 million Americans of all ages were without health insurance as of March this year, up from 25.5 million or 7.7 percent at the end of the previous year.The percentage of uninsured people earning below the federal poverty level increased from 13.9 percent last year to 15.7 percent in the first quarter of 2024, the highest percentage among income levels.Almost two-thirds (64.9 percent) of...

All insurers in Illinois will now be required to cover induced abortions, thanks to a new bill signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker. This week, Pritzker held a signing ceremony for the Birth Equity Initiative, which mandates that Illinois-based health insurance, both private and Medicaid, must cover abortion with no co-pays or deductibles. The ceremony came on the heels of neighboring state Iowa’s law protecting nearly all preborn children from abortion taking effect, which lawmakers appeared to present as a reason for the bill’s passage. “Iowa is now the 22nd state in the nation to enact an extreme abortion ban solidifying...

If you are experiencing increased healthcare insurance and prescription costs, one reason may be the growing, middleman business of pharmacy benefit managers (PBM). The most recent article at The Alabama Examiner addresses Tennessee's PBM reform enacted in 2021. Alabamians are working hard to save our hometown pharmacies being driven out of business! https://www.alabamaexaminer.com/post/pbm-reform-enacted-in-tennessee-why-not-alabama

More Americans are driving without car insurance, and it’s making coverage more expensive for everyone else. The problem has been growing since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Insurance Research Council, whose latest data show the percentage of uninsured drivers rose to 14% in 2022, from about 11% in 2019. The IRC, which calculates the data based on the relative frequencies of auto-insurance claims, expects the numbers have continued to climb since then. Washington, D.C., New Mexico and Mississippi are among the jurisdictions with the highest share of uninsured motorists, the IRC says. Washington has recorded almost...

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) asserted that cross-sex hormones and surgeries were "medically necessary" so that insurance companies would pay for those procedures, allowing concerns about the treatments' affordability to dictate claims about their effectiveness, newly unsealed court documents show. WPATH's standards of care, which guide clinical practice in the United States, were updated in 2022 to include language about the medical necessity of hormones and surgeries because, as one WPATH official wrote in an email, the group was frustrated with America's "obtuse and unhealthy system of healthcare 'coverage.'" Most private insurance plans and state Medicaid policies...

The real responsibility for California’s high insurance premiums lies in state politicians’ and the governor’s policy decisions. Most insurers say because of California’s high cost to rebuild, they can’t keep premiums artificially low any longer. And why are California’s rebuilding and building costs so high? The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA): As Ed Ring reported for the Globe, over 50+ years, “CEQA has acquired layers of legislative updates and precedent setting court rulings, warping it into a beast that denies clarity to developers and derails projects. When projects do make it through the CEQA gauntlet, the price of passage adds...

(RNS) — The Rev. John Parks was taking his first sabbatical in 40 years of ministry when he got a call from his church’s accountant with some bad news. Church Mutual, the church’s insurance company, had dropped them. “This does not make sense,” Parks, the pastor of Ashford Community Church in Houston, recalls thinking at the time. “We’ve never filed a claim.” Five months and 13 insurance companies later, the church finally found replacement coverage for $80,000 per year, up from the $23,000 they had been paying. “It’s been an adventure,” said the 69-year-old Parks from his home in Houston,...

I looked in my wallet because the little good angel voice in my head said "when was the last time you printed out new proof of car insurance forms?" I looked and saw I need to print new ones, when I logged into the website it said "We have re-rated your policy for the next 6 months, $xxxx will be deducted from your account on 7/31/2024" I was like ??? it should be $xxx I called them and they said "it is not your fault, but we don't know why" I called my state ins tzar and they said, wow...

Curtis Murrah says he’d been a loyal customer with USAA for 28 years — until his wife rang him up one day saying she couldn’t make their mortgage payment because there wasn’t any money in their account. Murrah, who’s based in Georgia, says he took a closer look at his accounts and discovered someone was making deposits in and out of his accounts. “It was like they were playing mind games,” he told News 4 San Antonio. “They would deposit $9,800 then turn right around and withdraw $9,800. They would deposit $4,000, turn right around and withdrew it.” Murrah contacted...

READ MORE: The insurance on my 2012 Mazda went up 72% to $233 a month!' A prominent insurance provider has aired an ultimatum to the entire state of California. The firm, State Farm General, asked the state’s Department of Insurance Thursday to let them raise residential insurance rates for millions of citizens, or see them move out. The move indicates financial trouble for the insurance giant, which currently covers homes razed by wildfires. State Farm disclosed it is seeking a 30 percent rate hike for homeowners, a 36 percent increase for condo owners, and a 52 percent increase for renters...

Former BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST) employee Tanja Benton has been awarded over $680,000 by a Tennessee federal jury following a verdict that the insurer failed to offer reasonable accommodation for her religious beliefs. The jury concluded that BCBST “did not prove by a preponderance of the evidence either that it had offered a reasonable accommodation to Plaintiff or that it could not reasonably accommodate the Plaintiff’s religious beliefs without undue hardship.” The total damages awarded to Benton amounted to $687,240, which included $177,240 in back pay, $10,000 in compensatory damages, and $500,000 in punitive damages. In a related case,...

State Farm recently requested its largest home insurance rate increase to date, a move that would worsen the insurance crisis in California but also signaled that the company may be in financial trouble. State Farm General, the company’s California subsidiary, recently submitted a request to the California Department of Insurance to raise insurance rates for homeowners, condo owners and renters in the Golden State.