Relentless Excellence Is the Way Forward
Californians must take ownership of our future
By Stacy Korsgaden, September 30, 2025
The horrific Southern California fires of January 7, 2025, remind us how fragile life can be. Our fellow Californians lost loved ones, homes, and treasured possessions. It is heartbreaking and impossible to measure.
Insurance is an essential part of managing risk and recovering from catastrophes like the LA wildfires. As an insurance expert with over 35 years of experience, I know that before any insurance contract can be signed, there must first be an insurable risk, a condition worthy of insuring. Recently, we learned that five carriers are reentering the California market. While this is better news, the stark reality is, no matter how many companies return, we cannot thrive if the foundation of our state remains broken.
For decades, our leaders have undermined the institutions we depend on. Bad public policy and poor decisions are destroying our state and harming the insurance industry. How can we rebuild a reliable safety net when the very risks that must be managed and minimized are left to rage out of control? It is like asking a contractor to install a roof before the foundation has even been laid.
California, in the name of climate change, has harmed our forests and foothills. Our state is choked with decades of unmanaged brush and dead trees, heightening the risk of devastating wildfires. We are crippled by unreasonable environmental rules that turn preventable fires into infernos, leaving a once beautiful landscape looking like a moonscape. At the same time, prisons continue to close even as crime persists. Homelessness has been met with open checkbooks but little real progress. In addition, the California business climate, once the envy of the world, is steadily crumbling.
Wildfire management, crime, homelessness, and a strong business climate are the foundational pillars of a healthy insurance environment. When each of these pillars is weakened, the entire system becomes unstable. Today they are all in a state of crisis. Until California repairs these foundations, the insurance industry will remain unhealthy.
Proposition 103 and the Department of Insurance’s endless stopgaps will never resolve these deeper issues. The truth is that you and I, as Californians, must take ownership of our future. We must manage and conserve our resources rather than use climate change as an excuse for inaction. We must protect our citizens by getting tough on crime. We must secure our most precious resource, water, by storing it for the inevitable times of drought instead of allowing it to flow to the ocean.
Finally, to make all this work, we must embrace the principles that allow companies to compete for business based on price and service. Proposition 103, established in 1988, has led us directly to where we are today, with an industry as unhealthy as the leadership at the top.
California can be more than beautiful. But if we are to truly thrive, we must also be tough, smart, and relentlessly excellent.
