Our readers will know that I’m the director of the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC this year, and as part of the process of selecting candidates for the legislative endorsements we’ve done we’ve made dozens of candidate calls. We’ve asked them about issues their voters are talking about, and insurance keeps coming up again and again as a hot button.

Which makes it fascinating that the state’s insurance commissioner race never materialized. Tim Temple, who lost four years ago to the now-retiring incumbent Jim Donelon, has already been elected after the underfunded Democrat, Rich Weaver, who qualified against him dropped out. So fixing the insurance crisis in the state is now on Temple – and the legislature.

Why are insurance rates sky high in Louisiana? We’re in crisis mode with health insurance, with home insurance and with car insurance all at the same time.

Property insurance is really a function of Hurricane Ida blowing through the most populated part of the state and hammering Southeast Louisiana with a wide swath of destruction, on top of a number of other storms – like the two which hit Lake Charles practically back-to-back – already roiling the market. Now we’ve got a problem with carriers pulling out of writing insurance in the state.

And car insurance is bad enough thanks to the fact that more lawsuits get filed for personal injury claims coming out of car wrecks here than anywhere else, but now you have rampant car theft spooling up in the state’s major cities. In New Orleans there have been an astounding 4,858 car thefts in the first eight months of this year; why anybody would insure those cars until law enforcement puts a stop to the rash of car thefts is a good question.

Old-school Louisiana politics would dictate that Temple would be saying “Imma round up these greedy insurance companies and squeeze ’em fer ya.” But that’s part of the problem as is – the carriers are terrified of the political risk of operating in this market, and that’s why so few actually operate here.

Less carriers means less competition, which means they can get away with higher rates and so they do.

Temple comes from the industry, having been an insurance broker, so he understands the economics – and his recent statements are all about building a healthy market rather than demagoguing the players in it.

“You can’t drive a car without insurance,” Temple said. “You can’t own a mortgage without insurance. You can’t operate a business without insurance. So, I see the positive benefits that insurance plays every day on people’s lives. So, I want to make sure it’s there, it’s available, and it’s affordable.”

What Temple wants to do is bring insurance rates down, and he’s confident he can do that.

“Everybody talks about the hurricanes we’ve had,” Temple said. “We have flooding on a regular basis, and now we have wildfires. It’s not the weather. It’s not the weather component. We can’t do anything about it, so we shouldn’t try and say we’ve got to do something about hurricanes. What we can do is we have control over our regulatory environment in the state of Louisiana, and we have control over our statutory, our legal environment in the state. So I’m going to focus on that.”

Temple plans to make Louisiana a more attractive state for insurance companies to come back or to come for the first time.

“You can’t regulate premium decreases, and you can’t mandate premium decreases,” Temple said. “The only thing you can do that’s going to be lasting is create a competitive environment so that more companies come in. When more companies come to Louisiana, you have choices, and when you have choices, that’s when you see rates go down.”

He said insurance companies are not the enemy.

“We want companies to come in,” Temple said. “We want them to be vibrant. We want them to make money because you can’t pay claims if you don’t make money. You’ve got to have a profit.”

“At the same time, we’re going to make sure that they handle their business right, that they have proper reinsurance, that they have financial resources to handle catastrophic claims if we’re taking about homeowners,” he added. “If we’re talking about auto, we’re going to make sure they have a fair playing field, but we’re going to hold them accountable.”

Temple said he’s working on a plan to bring insurance companies back in. He feels confident he can bring insurance rates down for people across the state.