• Office: Insurance Commissioner
• Election Date: June 2, 2026
• Candidate: Patrick Wolff
• Due Date: April 2, 2026
• Printable Version

Thank you for seeking GrowSF's endorsement for the June 2, 2026 primary election! GrowSF believes in a growing, vibrant, healthy, safe, and prosperous city via common sense solutions and effective government.

As a candidate for state office, your day-to-day responsibilities in office will affect not just San Francisco, but California as a whole. As a representative of the people of California and of San Francisco, the policies you bring to Sacramento should reflect the best of what we have to offer.

The GrowSF endorsement committee will review all completed questionnaires and seek consensus on which candidates best align with our vision for San Francisco and have the expertise to enact meaningful policy changes.

We ask that you please complete this questionnaire by April 2, 2026 so we have enough time to adequately review and discuss your answers.

• Your Policy Goals
• Your Leadership
• The Issues
• Personal
• Thank you

Your Policy Goals

We'd like to get some details about your high-level goals and how you intend to use your elected office to achieve them.

What policies do you hope to change or preserve by running for Insurance Commissioner? Please be specific, and list them in order of priority.

California's P&C insurance market is in crisis. The California Department of Insurance (CDI) is currently addressing this crisis through a set of reforms it calls the Sustainable Insurance Strategy (SIS). The SIS has started enacting regulatory changes to allow insurance companies to more accurately predict risk. I am committed to carrying forward and strengthening the SIS. I will also streamline the filing review and approval process. Many other states similarly require insurance filings to be reviewed and approved before they can be implemented, but in those states the process only takes about 60 days. In California, it takes 300 days and sometimes can take well over a year, making it nearly impossible for insurance companies to operate normally. It is imperative to rejuvenate choice and competition in California's P&C insurance market.

While my top priority is to rejuvenate California's P&C market, this must go hand in glove with holding insurance companies accountable so that customers are empowered and insurance companies do not have market power. My top priority here is to use detailed data already at the CDI collected via Market Conduct Annual Surveys to produce a "scorecard" specific to each insurance company that tells every customer shopping or renewing how that insurance company has behaved in paying claims. By putting this information into the marketplace in an easily understandable way, customers will be able to hold insurance companies accountable for their behavior when making the purchase or renewal decision, which will help discipline insurance companies to behave correctly when paying claims.

We must also fix the FAIR Plan. I list this priority after the top two, because I believe most of the work of fixing the FAIR Plan will be done by fixing the regular, admitted market. As that happens, insurance companies must be required to invest the resources to improve underwriting and servicing so while we still need the FAIR Plan it provides adequate coverage. Then as the market heals, pricing must be aligned with risk so that the FAIR Plan is financially sound and customers are incentivized to find better and cheaper coverage in the regular market.

Other policy goals in P&C, listed in rough order of priority, include the following:

• Rebuilding the technical stack of the CDI, both front-end website and back-end processing
• Reforming the "Safer from Wildfire" program, so that it actually aligns with insurance company underwriting, provides meaningful discounts for taking the right actions to harden homes, and is paired with appropriate financial support to help homeowners take the actions that will reduce wildfire risk both at their home and for their neighbors
• Implementing regulation to allow customer to opt-in to the use of telematics for auto insurance underwriting (we are the only state that does not allow this), with strong privacy protections
• Publishing an annual benchmarking report that compares California to the other western, fire-affected states, so people can see whether California's insurance market is fair and efficient
• Explore building an AI interface, trained on all the insurance policies on file with the CDI along with expert feedback, that all customers can use to have explained exactly what their policy covers

The CDI has surprisingly little oversight of health insurance. (About 95% of covered lives in health insurance in California is regulated by the Department of Managed Healthcare, which is part of the governor's office.) California is unique in having this split regulation, and it creates substantial problems. I would like to spearhead legislation to combine the regulation into a single department. Prior efforts have floundered because the Insurance Commissioner has wanted to keep control. I have no interest in protecting bureaucratic turf; I would be totally focused on simply getting this right.

In life insurance, I believe the most pressing issue is the growing risk presented by private equity firms buying life insurance companies, levering up the balance sheet, and evading state-based regulatory oversight. Unfortunately, this is a national problem, with most of the risk being taken by life insurance companies domiciled in other states, so there is no direct action California can take to regulate the risk those life insurance companies are taking. At a minimum, the next insurance commissioner should provide disclosure to California customers to provide them with information to help identify which carriers could be riskier. However, to really address this problem the next insurance commissioner will need to work within the NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) to get the NAIC to impose stricter oversight to enforce the key provisions of the Model Holding Company Act that could arrest and reverse this growing risk.

Why those policies?

For obvious reasons, the P&C market needs to be the top focus. My policies are designed to make the market function efficiently while providing the accountability and transparency to also make it fair.

Explain why your #1 goal is your #1 goal.

California's dysfunctional P&C market is having serious economic consequences. Strengthening the SIS and streamlining filings are absolutely necessary to rejuvenate choice and competition.

How will you build the coalition and political capital to enact your #1 goal? What obstacles will you face, and how will you overcome them? Will the power of the office of Insurance Commissioner be enough to achieve this goal?

The power of the office of Insurance Commissioner is enough to achieve my #1 goal of fixing California's dysfunctional P&C market. However, my success will depend critically on building credibility and goodwill within the office of the Department of Insurance.

The Insurance Commissioner appoints approximately 10 high-ranking officials. All the other 1,400 employees of the Department are civil servants, who are extremely difficult to fire. Many have worked within the Department for over two decades. I will need the cooperation of the people who will be working for me in order to succeed.

If I am elected, then when I assume the role of Insurance Commissioner my very first act will be to start a "listening tour" throughout the three main offices (Sacramento, Oakland, LA) of the Department. I want to hear what people within the Department believe, and get to know the people who work there. This will be how I build the internal coalition and political capital to succeed.

Will the power of the office of Insurance Commissioner be enough to achieve the other goals?

I spent much of last year studying the office and I believe that the power of the office of Insurance Commissioner is sufficient to achieve all of the key P&C goals I listed above.

For health insurance and life insurance, I have noted where the Insurance Commissioner would need to work with other entities to achieve my goals.

What is an "out there" change that you would make to state or local government policy, if you could? For the purpose of this question, you are not constrained to the office of Insurance Commissioner.

California is dramatically behind in the amount of controlled burns it does for its forests. My understanding is we should be doing approximately 500,000 acres/year in California, but we only do about 20-25% of that amount. We cannot significantly reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires until we manage our forests better.

Your Leadership

We'd like to learn more about your leadership style and plan to execute effectively once you assume office.

Why are you running for Insurance Commissioner?

I am running for Insurance Commissioner because I want to serve the public, and I believe this is the best way I can put my skills and experience to work to make a real difference.

I am 58 years old. My wife and I have been married for 24 years. Our son is at college, and our daughter is a high school senior about to leave the house. Now is the perfect time for me to undertake one more big project. My goal is to serve two successful terms, and then to retire from elected office and go back to being an engaged citizen and a happy husband and father.

In your own words - or, in internet parlance, "Explain like I'm five" (ELI5) - what is insurance?

At its core, insurance has two key ideas:

1. Transferring risk from an individual to a group
2. Sharing losses among all members of a group

Sometimes, the way we share the loss is by predicting and pricing the risk. We generally do this when the risk is something that can be changed, and when we don't think it is something that was imposed on us by factors outside our control. Virtually all P&C insurance falls into this category. It is extremely valuable for us as a society to get accurate risk pricing for fire or auto insurance, for example, and we believe these risks can be affected by changing behavior or utilizing technology. Term life insurance is another example; we price the risk of early death over a specific period of time, allowing people to insure themselves against the loss of income that would come from early death.

Sometimes, the way we share the loss is by pooling the risk without trying to price it. We generally do this when we do not want to exclude some people from coverage, because we think the risk was imposed by factors outside their control and/or we think it would be very unfair. Health insurance has some characteristics of this – we do not want to impose huge costs on individuals for having preexisting conditions that are outside of their control, and so we collectively pool (to some degree) the cost of assuming the risk for everyone.

What exactly is the role and statutory responsibilities of the Insurance Commissioner?

The Insurance Commissioner regulates insurance companies (and other insurance licensees such as agents and brokers) in order to protect customers and foster a well functioning market.

The statutory responsibilities are quite broad. They are comprehensively and precisely described in Division 3 ("The Insurance Commissioner"), Chapter 2 ("Powers and Duties"), section 12919-12938 of the Insurance Code. When I asked ChatGPT to summarize these, it gave me the following useful list:

• Enforcing the Insurance Code and related insurance laws
• Licensing and regulating the people and entities that transact insurance
• Examining insurers for solvency and compliance
• Handling consumer complaints and claim-handling misconduct
• Mediating complaints (but not adjudicating private claims)
• Regulating P&C rates under Proposition 103
• Investigative and enforcement powers (e.g. regarding insurance fraud)
• Reporting and public accountability (e.g. by filing an annual report to the Governor, Legislature, and legislative insurance committees by August 1 each year)

The Department of Insurance regulates all P&C and life insurance. The Insurance Commissioner runs the Department, and – with the support of staff and subject to law and procedure – is the final decision maker in all policy matters.

As noted above, the Department of Insurance has relatively little oversight of health insurance in California, which is an unusual feature of insurance regulation in this state.

What makes you uniquely qualified for this position?

Early in my career, I worked at Capital One from 2001-2005, where I spent four years building an auto and home insurance brokerage business. I earned my Chartered Financial Analyst designation in 2004. Since 2005 I have worked as a financial analyst and investor, analyzing and investing in companies and markets including insurance. I have worked with insurance companies, served insurance customers, invested in insurance companies, and analyzed insurance markets and companies for 25 years. I have much more insurance experience and expertise than any of the other major Democrat candidates, as well as much more insurance experience and expertise than the current Insurance Commissioner had when he ran for office.

I believe the root of California's insurance crisis is we have been electing the wrong people to be Insurance Commissioner. We have been electing politicians who treat the role as a stepping stone rather than people with genuine expertise.

California is one of only 11 states that elects the Insurance Commissioner; the other 39 states appoints this position. The role of Insurance Commissioner is a technical role. It requires you to be a champion for the customer, and to be deeply knowledgeable of how insurance works. Good regulation is informed by a deep understanding of insurance operationally, financially and economically.

What three measurable outcomes should Californians use to evaluate your success after your first two years in office?

We should have plenty of insurance companies operating in California, so that it is once again easy to find insurance. This can be directly measured by surveys and by benchmarking California to other states.

Pricing should be reasonable. This can be measured in two ways: (1) by benchmarking California to other states, adjusting for cost of living; (2) by directly analyzing the profitability of insurance companies.

We should be clearly on track or actually implementing some of the technological investments and other programs (e.g. the annual benchmarking report, the "claims report card") that I described above.

The Issues

Next, we will cover the issues that voters tell us they care about. We hope to gain a better understanding of your policy positions, and we hope that you use this opportunity to communicate with voters.

Some small businesses in San Francisco complain about too-high rates for event or general liability insurance. Do you think these complaints have merit in general? What reforms ought the office of the Insurance Commissioner make to help small businesses thrive?

The global driver of high rates and lack of availability for liability insurance is the set of barriers we impose on insurance companies from entering the state and doing business. We must lower the barriers to entry by reducing the time for filings to be reviewed (from 300 days to 60 days) and creating much more certainty around what insurance companies need to do to get their filings approved. This will increase choice and competition overall, including for general liability insurance.

I am sure there are also specific issues around lawsuits that can be addressed. In general, the goal for lawsuits should be to foster clarity of coverage and to empower customers (in this case small businesses) to receive full and prompt payment in the most efficient way possible so as not to impose unnecessary costs that are passed through in the form of higher rates.

Are there currently any homeowners or renters insurance market failures where the Insurance Commissioner ought to step in to fix? What are they, and how would you address them?

Yes. A key market failure is that homeowners are not getting the right information about what actions they can take to lower risk, and not being properly incentivized to make those home hardening investments.

The CDI has a program called, "Safer from Wildfires" that attempts to bridge this gap. However, my understanding is that this program is not working very well because the CDI is attempting to tell the insurance companies what home hardening actions they should recognize. This mismatch between the guidance and the underwriting causes insurance companies to offer token discounts to satisfy regulatory requirements without helping the market work better.

What I would do instead is make it a requirement of every insurance company doing business in California to tell the CDI what actions will reduce fire risk and offer meaningful discounts for proof of compliance. By structuring the requirement in this way, insurance companies are forced to compete for business by providing home hardening information that is rewarded – but they are provided the latitude they need to determine what actually works with their underwriting modeling.

I would also make it a priority to create programs that offer appropriate subsidies for homeowners to make some of these investments. The CDI was recently provided this authority through the passage of AB 888 in the last legislative session. Done right, such subsidies are welfare-enhancing because home hardening has a public good component – if you harden your home, you help your neighbors as well as yourself – and public goods should be paid by taxpayers because the private market will insufficiently incentivize them.

Are current policies around earthquake insurance adequate to ensure the state can recover from a hundred-year earthquake? If not, how would you address this?

No, but quite frankly this is a very hard problem to solve.

There are two key problems. First, there is moral hazard, because most people believe – and they are almost certainly correct! – that if there is a catastrophic earthquake the government will step in to make them whole. In a sense, we are implicitly pooling the risk rather than pricing it (see the ELI5 explanation above), without making this explicit since the frequency is so low.

The second key problem is there is no mechanism to force people to be adequately covered. Specifically, earthquake insurance is not required to get a mortgage. (This is in contrast to homeowners/fire insurance, which is required for a mortgage.) Again, the reason is probably that the frequency is so low that it is easy to put the risk out of mind – many people may live their entire lives without experiencing a hundred-year earthquake!

In an ideal world, earthquake insurance would be required for a mortgage, which would force the risk to be priced and would prevent a potential crisis when the inevitable "big one" happens. But realistically, I do not know whether the California Insurance Commissioner can do this. It might require national action with Fannie and Freddie.

California's home-insurance market has faced major disruption, with several large insurers reducing coverage or leaving parts of Los Angeles County and other high risk areas. Are California's current fire-insurance policies and rate-approval processes adequate for the growing risks along the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)?

I have described above how the rate-approval process needs to be reformed.

I think there is an opportunity to experiment with pilot programs to create new fire insurance policies to try to align incentives to reduce fire risk, particularly along the WUI. One promising example is group homeowners insurance, proposed by Daniel Schwarcz, one of the leading academic experts in insurance law and consumer protection.

I would also like to note that Daniel Schwarcz has endorsed me for California Insurance Commissioner.

Should insurance premiums in high-risk areas more closely reflect true wildfire risk, or should taxpayers subsidize that risk to keep coverage below market rates?

In a well functioning market, we should see the following:

• Lots of insurance companies competing to price risk and find ways to incentivize customers to reduce risk
• Premiums adequate to price risk plus compensate insurers for their cost of capital
• No pricing power for insurance companies – so premiums are not excessive

If the market is functioning as described above, then even with smart regulation that tries to solve market failures to align incentives to reduce risk, we may still see very high premiums in high-risk areas. People in high-risk areas will naturally want to have lower premiums. We then have three options.

1. Cross-Subsidization: lower risk areas can pay higher premiums to subsidize the risk for people in higher risk areas
2. Taxpayer Subsidization: taxpayers can directly subsidize the risk for people in higher risk areas
3. Do Nothing: just allow the market to price risk

I believe there are good reasons to do some subsidization for reasons of equity or fairness. As a general matter, I believe subsidization for reasons of equity or fairness is often better done by the legislature than the insurance commissioner. The insurance commissioner is only one person, and is not elected with the mandate to transfer money from some people to others. Furthermore, insurance regulation is much more opaque than legislation. However, I do think the insurance commissioner can and should play a very useful role in identifying fairness or equity issues and lifting those up for the legislature to consider.

Recent reforms to California's insurance rate-setting framework allow forward looking, and risk-based pricing in order to stabilize the insurance market while protecting consumers. What other changes to rate-calculation rules would you prioritize to ensure insurers can price risk accurately without triggering excessive premium volatility or market withdrawal? Please name one concrete metric or safeguard you would use to judge whether these reforms are working (e.g., insurer participation, rate-filing approval timelines, or geographic availability of coverage).

As I have described above, I support strengthening the SIS, and I support dramatic streamlining of filing reviews and approvals so that strict scrutiny is reserved only for special cases that require it.

The specific changes to rate-calculation rules are too complex to go into in this questionnaire. However, from what I have seen, I believe the recent rules promulgated by the CDI are flawed, as described in this New York Times article from November, 2025. The CDI imposed the requirement that insurance companies should write policies in fire-prone areas at least equal to 85% of their market share across the state. The problem is that "fire-prone areas" was defined as being on certain ZIP codes, which means that when insurance companies *actually* analyzed each specific home, it allowed the first movers to cherry pick safe homes and leave the riskiest homes. This risks severely distorting the market.

While these recent rules had good intentions, it shows how much damage can be done by regulations that are overly intrusive in an effort to mandate the desired outcome.

In general, the right way is to regulate market conduct, while making it easy for insurance companies to enter the market and compete for customers without trying to impose restrictions on their underwriting.

What additional safeguards (beyond the Political Reform Act) will you commit to, to ensure independence from the insurance industry (e.g., recusals, donation bans, transparency dashboards)?

I have made three pledges:

1. My campaign is not accepting any money from insurance companies or their employees
2. I will not accept corporate gifts
3. I will not run for any other elected office after being elected insurance commissioner

I have absolutely no interest in using this office to further my career, or accepting fancy perks while in office. I just want to do the best possible job for the people to serve the public good.

Identify one Department of Insurance policy, regulation, or enforcement decision from the past five years that you would have handled differently. Cite the policy, explain your reasoning, and specify what data guided your judgment.

An easy answer to this question is to refer you to my answer two questions above, which cited the NY Times article.

Let me give another answer, which goes back slightly farther than two years, but which I believe is very instructive. After the fires of 2017 and 2018, when insurance companies were unable to use forward looking models to predict fire risk and started withdrawing from California, the CDI allowed State Farm to expand aggressively.

Of course, allowing the insurance market to become increasingly devoid of competition and increasingly reliant on the FAIR Plan and State Farm was a mistake. However, the CDI also made a key error in its handling of State Farm. It allowed State Farm to operate in the state as a subsidiary, without getting the parent company to commit to backstopping the company in case of financial distress. Thus, when the catastrophic 2025 fires happened, the CDI had no legal recourse to get the State Farm parent to support the subsidiary. As a result, State Farm's LA customers have had absolutely terrible experiences in getting claims paid, and at the same time State Farm has demanded an emergency rate hike, which the CDI has had to grant in part because of the temporary market power State Farm has.

The entire affair has been a terrible failure of insurance regulation.

Personal

Tell us a bit about yourself!

How long have you lived in California? What brought you here and what keeps you here?

I first moved to California in 1999 to jump into the "dot com boom/bubble," as we called it then. I lived and worked in Silicon Valley but I met my future wife in San Francisco. When my dot com went bust in 2001 my wife (then fiancee) and I moved to Washington, DC where I worked at Capital One for four years and she got her masters degree in public policy. We still loved San Francisco and so when I got a job here we moved in 2005 when she was pregnant with our first child. We have lived in San Francisco ever since.

Several things keep us in San Francisco. My wife and I have had our work here. We both have many friends here. The city is of course incredibly beautiful and has many amazing amenities. And in spite of the things that sometimes drive me crazy, we both love how vibrant and energetic San Francisco is. This is a city that has constantly reinvented itself, and I have total faith it will continue to do so.

What do you love most about California and/or your hometown?

California is one of the most economically, technologically, and culturally exciting and successful places on Earth – and it has an amazing climate and incredible natural beauty to boot.

What do you dislike the most about California and/or your hometown?

California's government is maddeningly dysfunctional. I would like to change that for the better in my own small way.

Tell us about your current involvement in the community (e.g., volunteer groups, neighborhood associations, civic and professional organizations, etc.)

In 2010, I founded an annual non-profit charity conference called "Excellence in Investing" that has now raised over $4 million to support groups that help at-risk kids thrive.

I started getting deeply involved in local and state politics in 2016. I began by being a volunteer with YIMBY, helping campaigns of pro-housing politicians like Scott Wiener and London Breed, and just generally getting involved in policy and political issues.

During the Pandemic, I co-founded Families for San Francisco with my friend, Seeyew Mo, and for the next few years we were very active in local San Francisco issues, especially public schools. I was active in the school board recall, and also very engaged in SFUSD policy activism.

I have been on the board of the Westside Family Democratic Club for over two years.

I have been on the Citizens' Bond Oversight Committee for SFUSD for over two years.

Thank you

Thank you for giving us your time and answering our questionnaire. We look forward to reading your answers and considering your candidacy!