By Mark Gongloff
Florida has passed tort-reform laws in response to the national home-insurance crisis, arguing that frivolous lawsuits are the cause of soaring premiums and insurers abandoning the state.
The results of the reform have been that home-insurance premiums soared 18% in 2025, and Florida still has the highest premiums in the country, with the percentage of insurance claims that were denied rising from 30% in 2023 to 40% in 2024.
Tort reform has produced more lawsuits than ever, with Florida homeowners filing 143 suits for every 1,000 denied claims last year, and many of the new insurers that entered Florida's market are not capitalized well enough to handle a significant disaster.
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All of this was predictable. Florida has repeatedly applied tort-reform medicine to its insurance problem since the 1980s. None of it has helped, according to Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School and co-founder of the advocacy group Americans for Insurance Reform. She and a former Texas insurance commissioner, Robert Hunter, produced a series of national studies going back to 1999 and discovered time and again that tort reform never helps customers.
“The insurance industry comes to a state and says rates are going up and the only way to bring them down is to pass tort reform,” Doroshow told me. “In every single case, rates continue to go up, because the reasons rates go up have nothing to do with these kinds of tort limits.”
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