The Florida insurance industry shouldn’t look for any help from the governor’s office in explaining the property insurance crisis to the public after January as Jim Davis, Democrat and Charlie Crist, Republican advance to the general election. Davis pulled out a close win in his race against Rod Smith in the Florida primary, but Tom Gallagher took a real whipping from Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist - losing badly with only 34% of the vote compared to Crist’s 64%.

Gallagher, while never a big favorite of the industry, always possessed a good working knowledge of insurance, having served for years as Florida’s insurance commissioner.

From Gallagher, the realist, you didn’t hear a lot of pandering to the voters on insurance issues. (Well, OK, once in a while...) For the most part, he understood the hard realities of the industry — the fine line between creating a viable marketplace for insurance companies while managing rates and consumer expectations.

His stated solutions to the current property insurance dilemma included strengthening Floridian’s homes and helping people to afford improvements. It may have been his record of no big promises of rate relief or availability that cost him so dearly at the polls.

Rod Smith also had a plan to deal with the property insurance crisis that did not include demonizing the industry. The plan involved stabilizing Citizens by dedicating 80% of sales tax revenues on storm-related purchases to Citizen’s revenue stream and establishing a government funded windstorm pool covering the 1st 50 - 100K of coverage. Perhaps not practical, with a price tag estimated at $28 billion, but an idea worthy of consideration.

So what do Davis and Crist have to offer? Sound bite solutions, most involving the concept that the insurance industry is the big, greedy enemy. The threat to force insurance companies who write auto insurance in Florida to also write property insurance — apparently so that we can add an auto insurance crisis to the property insurance crisis.

The fanciful wish that somehow Florida affiliates of national insurers could be forced to pass their property underwriting losses up to big momma where somebody else could pay for our hurricanes. Davis referred to the property insurance flood exclusion as a "loophole."

And, of course, more, bigger and badder consumer advocates. The concept of yet another "consumer advocate" looking over the shoulder of the existing consumer advocate, looking over the shoulder of the insurance commissioner, overseen by the CFO is worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit. Just keep adding advocates until the rates come down...

One of the candidates proposed to move the consumer advocate (not sure which one) up to the governor’s office where he would be "more accessible." Sure — that’ll fix that little $52 billion hurricane loss problem.

As Sam Miller of the Florida Insurance Council stated, "You could put a consumer advocate on the moon, and if that person is intellectually honest, they are going to support a lot of rate increases."

Sound bite solutions come from pandering politicians who either don’t really understand the issues or just like to tell the voters what they want to hear. The citizens of Florida deserve more than that.