Patrick Wolff for California insurance commissioner

California insurance commissioner used to be considered a cushy landing pad for politicians to collect a paycheck while building statewide name recognition. 

That’s because recent deadly wildfires exposed a crisis hiding in plain sight.

Insurance premiums in California hadn’t sufficiently risen to account for climate change, poor forest management and development in fire-prone areas. Proposition 103, a voter-approved 1988 measure, established an onerous process for raising rates in the name of consumer protection.

Insurers begrudgingly stayed quiet for years. But when devastation from megafires revealed how unable they were to adequately price risk, they stopped renewing policies, restricted new business or left the state entirely.

Everything from home mortgages to affordable housing development was thrown into chaos. Desperate homeowners fled to the state’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, which offers pricey, bare-bones coverage to people who can’t find it anywhere else. 

Private insurers are responsible for claims that the FAIR Plan can’t cover, so they restricted coverage even further.

To slow this spiral, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara enacted a series of emergency reforms in late 2023 to give insurers more of what they want. 

The January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles County offered a test.

While no insurers went insolvent or fled the state, Chronicle investigations revealed that homeowners affected by the fires often struggled to get claims paid, while insurers pervasively underinsured homes and often balked at cleaning up smoke contamination. 

Some insurers have recently started to write new policies, although not enough yet to meaningfully depopulate the FAIR Plan. A New York Times investigation found that Lara’s reforms allowed insurers to cherry-pick coverage to avoid high-risk homes.

In short, California’s insurance market still has serious structural weaknesses.

With Lara termed out, 11 candidates are running in the June primary election to fix the state’s problems.   

The most aggressive is former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, the California director of the Working Families Party, who wants to effectively blow up the system by establishing a state-run single-payer disaster insurance program with guaranteed coverage. She would also require insurers to pay interest on delayed or underpaid claims and push the state to offer guaranteed health care coverage for children. 

“We should start acting like the big state that we are,” she told us in an endorsement interview. “I don’t actually believe the insurers want to exit our market.”

While this tough talk might sound good in TV ads, Kim’s approach reflects the same flawed thinking that arguably pushed California into its crisis. And her proposals are almost certainly dead on arrival — the fiercest consumer advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog, opposes the disaster insurance idea.

Instead of picking unnecessary political fights, California’s next commissioner needs to balance holding insurers accountable while keeping them happy enough to write policies that get people off the FAIR Plan. This means conveying to Californians that rates still need to rise in the short term — while pushing lawmakers to invest in the risk mitigation measures like home hardening and defensible space needed to bring costs down in the long term.

We trust two candidates to do that.

State Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat who represents the Palisades, is widely regarded as a thoughtful lawmaker who takes the time to understand all sides of an issue. As someone who witnessed the devastation wrought by the Los Angeles fires and the roadblocks to rebuilding, Allen has unique insight into the insurance market’s strengths and weaknesses. Accordingly, he’s authored important consumer-protection laws — including one requiring insurers to increase upfront payment for personal property claims without residents first having to submit a detailed home inventory — and is working on bills to provide low-interest loans for risk-reduction projects and help homeowners keep their coverage if they mitigate insurer-identified risks. 

Allen is an experienced legislator capable of pushing big reforms through the state’s bureaucracy as needed. But experts we spoke with suggested that Lara’s reforms still need time to fully bake. California needs someone to competently regulate the new system before we can fully understand and patch its shortcomings.

That’s exactly what Democrat Patrick Wolff, a financial analyst and American chess grandmaster, is proposing to do. Wolff knows California insurance regulations better than any other candidate: He not only built an auto and home insurance brokerage but also obtained his insurance license before entering the race. 

Instead of immediately reinventing the system, Wolff wants to do the hard work of making it run well. In an endorsement interview, he told us that California insurance commissioners have historically focused on micromanaging every rate filing instead of regulating insurers’ broader market conduct — whether they’re appropriately underwriting policies and effectively handling claims. He also committed to following the 60-day timeframe established by Prop 103 in which certain rate change requests are deemed approved. The department has historically required insurers to waive that provision, often leading to requests being stuck in limbo for months. 

Wolff’s mission is to “reform the credibility of the office itself” — which is desperately needed after Lara’s history of ethical scandals and jetting off on lavish trips with oft-undisclosed funders.

While Wolff doesn’t have prior political experience, we’re convinced his deep understanding of insurance and financial markets, as well as his evident passion for the work, will go a long way toward getting stakeholders on board.

“What we need to do is just have the courage to think a little bit differently — that this role can actually have someone who’s really qualified and really just wants to do the job as opposed to somebody who views this as a stepping stone or as a platform for an ideological agenda,” Wolff told us. 

We agree. Wolff deserves your vote.

Other top contenders include Republican Merritt Farren, a former attorney for Disney and Amazon whose home burned down in the Palisades fire — prompting him to become a consumer advocate and intervene in a State Farm rate case; former state Sen. Steven Bradford, a Gardena (Los Angeles County) Democrat who pledged to use “more of the carrot than the stick” to lure insurers back to the state; and Stacy Korsgaden, a Republican licensed insurance agent whose deep industry knowledge sometimes takes an odd back seat to her pledges to be “tough on crime.”

Also running is Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas, a high school teacher and Peace and Freedom Party candidate, and Keith Davis, an American Independent Party candidate and licensed insurance agent. 

Republicans Sean Lee, a financial services executive; Eric Thor Aarnio, a contractor; and Robert Howell, a cybersecurity company CEO, didn’t respond to our interview requests. 

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