Endorsement: One candidate is ready to be California’s insurance commissioner. The other would be a disaster 64%
By Chronicle Editorial Board76%
8/1/2026, 4:00:00 AM
Topics: Endorsement, Insurance Commissioner Race
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Representativeness Heuristic, and Loss Aversion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 27.4% saturation with 295 hits. Analysis detected 2,508 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,075 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52% and a BS Rank of 64% (9,597 of 26,004 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 63.10% of the article peer group.
For the first time in history, California voters will choose between two Democrats in the November race for state insurance commissioner: Jane Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor and California director of the Working Families Party, and state Sen.
Ben Allen of Santa Monica.
In the current populist climate, voters in deep-blue California may view the race’s lack of a Republican as an opportunity to throw caution to the wind and select a more radical candidate.
In this case, that would be a terrible mistake.
Here’s why:
Ever since the wildfires of 2017 and 2018, California’s insurance market has been in a state of emergency, imperiling everything from affordable housing development to your ability to secure and maintain a mortgage.
One key reason is Proposition 103, a 1988 ballot measure that established an onerous process for raising insurance rates in the name of protecting consumers.
Everyone wants a cheaper bill, but Prop 103 prevented insurers from charging premiums that accounted for the mounting risks of climate change and soaring development in fire-prone areas.
Unable to adequately price risk after the megafires, insurers stopped renewing policies, restricted new business or left California entirely.
Desperate homeowners were forced onto the state’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, which offers pricey, bare-bones coverage to people who can’t find it anywhere else.
But private insurers are responsible for claims the FAIR Plan can’t afford — prompting them to restrict coverage even further.
The market has began to show signs of recovery as a series of emergency measures implemented by outgoing commissioner Ricardo Lara in 2023 have finally taken root.
Insurers are finally starting to write new policies in the state.
But electing a rash insurance commissioner could reverse that progress and cause the market to implode, with 39 million Californians as collateral damage.
And Jane Kim is as rash as they come.
In our endorsement interview, she dismissed Lara’s reforms as “managing decline” and insisted that California is large and powerful enough that it can — and should — bully insurers into doing its bidding.
“I don’t actually believe the insurers want to exit our market.”
But recent history — and the fact that hundreds of thousands of homeowners remain on the FAIR plan — shows she’s dead wrong.
Nevertheless, Kim wants to blow up the existing system and replace it with a state-run single-payer disaster insurance program with guaranteed coverage.
It’s an idea that even the state’s most ardent ratepayer advocates have rejected, and that Kim herself acknowledged in our endorsement interview will require “a lot of political compromise.”
Kim is a skilled communicator, and her platform is politically seductive.
But it’s a recipe for disaster.
Yes, significant reforms to the insurance market are still needed.
Chronicle investigations in the wake of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires exposed key issues, including the fact that insurers pervasively underinsured homes and often balked at cleaning up smoke contamination.
And a New York Times investigation found that Lara’s reforms allowed insurers to cherry-pick coverage to avoid high-risk homes.
But scrapping Lara’s efforts won’t fix things.
Instead, California needs an insurance commissioner willing and able to do the painstaking, detail-oriented work of a fair regulator — one with the gravitas to bring consumer advocacy groups and insurers to the table, and the smarts to identify snags in the system and potential fixes.
The commissioner needs to hold insurers accountable and regulate their market conduct while also fostering the conditions necessary for them to write policies to get Californians off the FAIR Plan.
That means conveying to residents that rates still need to rise in the short term — while pushing California’s next governor and state lawmakers to invest in risk mitigation measures, such as home hardening and defensible space, to bring costs down in the long term.
It’s a role well suited for Allen, who’s served in the state Senate for 12 years and has built a reputation in Sacramento as a thoughtful legislator who takes the time to understand all sides of an issue.
In our June primary endorsement, we identified Allen as one of two candidates we trusted to steer California’s insurance market through the delicate years ahead.
(The other candidate, financial analyst Patrick Wolff, didn’t advance past the primary and has since endorsed Allen.)
Representing communities afflicted by the Los Angeles wildfires has given Allen unique insight into the insurance market’s strengths and weaknesses and the challenges of rebuilding.
He’s also worked on a slew of insurance-related bills, including to require insurers to increase upfront payment for personal property claims, provide low-interest loans for risk-reduction projects and help homeowners keep their coverage if they mitigate insurer-identified risks.
Allen told us he’s “not interested in vilifying the industry” or any other player in the insurance space.
“I actually think that the situation’s calling out for a little bit of nuance and subtlety,” he said, adding that “anyone … who says there’s a lot of quick, easy answers is just, quite frankly, not telling the truth.”
We agree.
Kim, meanwhile, insisted to us that she’ll be able to work well with insurance companies despite her campaign inveighing against them.
She bragged that she has a long history of convincing industries to adopt policies that “seemed counter to their agenda” — citing her sponsorship of San Francisco’s Prop C in 2016, which significantly increased the percentage of affordable units that developers were required to either include in their projects or pay to be built elsewhere.
Yet Prop C was a spectacular failure.
Just as experts at the time predicted, the jacked-up rates made it difficult for projects to pencil out, prompting developers to propose fewer projects — reducing the production of both market-rate and affordable housing.
Supervisors were forced to reduce the requirements in 2017 and slash them even further in 2023.
With the city’s housing market still largely stalled, supervisors gutted them this July.
If Prop C is an example of how Kim would operate as insurance commissioner, voters should run screaming.
An insurance crisis decades in the making won’t be solved overnight — and it certainly won’t be fixed by capriciously blowing up the entire system.
Competent, careful work may not be a sexy campaign strategy, but it’s exactly what California needs to foster a functional insurance market.
Allen deserves your vote.
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