We recommend voting for Patrick Wolff for Insurance Commissioner. This was a close call — Ben Allen is also an excellent candidate, and we'd be happy to see either in the general election.

California's insurance market is broken. Insurance companies are leaving the state, the FAIR Plan has blown up to 610,000+ policies (up 154% since 2021), and homeowners in fire-prone areas are getting pushed into a bare-bones backup plan that just asked for a 36% rate hike. The next Insurance Commissioner needs to understand what's actually broken and how to fix it.

Why Patrick Wolff?

Wolff is a financial analyst who spent four years at Capital One building a home and auto insurance business and has spent 25 years analyzing insurance companies and markets. He's the only candidate in this race with a California insurance license. His diagnosis is precise: the Department of Insurance is "too lax regulating insurance companies' behavior, yet too strict controlling their market access."

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.

Patrick WolffFinancial Analyst

His plan: cut the filing review timeline from 300 days to 60 days (the standard in other states), strengthen the Sustainable Insurance Strategy, and publish a public "claims report card" grading every insurer on how they handle claims — shown to consumers before they buy. He also identified a specific CDI regulatory failure: the 85% market-share rule that defined "fire-prone areas" by ZIP code, letting first-movers cherry-pick safe homes and leaving the riskiest ones behind. That level of diagnostic precision matters when you're regulating a market this complex.

Beyond property and casualty insurance, Wolff wants to merge the CDI's health insurance oversight with the Department of Managed Healthcare (currently split ~5%/95%, unique to California), and he's flagged the growing risk of private equity firms buying life insurance companies and leveraging their balance sheets. These aren't headline issues, but they're exactly what a technically skilled Commissioner should be spotting. San Franciscans know Wolff as the founder of Families for San Francisco, the group that helped drive the 2022 school board recall. In a field dominated by career politicians, Wolff is an actual practitioner with a credible plan to help fix California's insurance market.

Why Ben Allen is also worth your consideration

This was a very close decision. Ben Allen is a State Senator who has spent over a decade working at the intersection of insurance, climate, and consumer protection — and his case is strong.

Allen represents the communities devastated by the Palisades Fire. He spent the aftermath helping hundreds of constituents fight for their insurance claims, giving him what he calls "a front-row seat to our broken insurance system." That experience isn't theoretical. He watched the FAIR Plan nearly collapse under $4 billion in losses, with costs spread to policyholders statewide via a $1 billion emergency assessment — and he identified it as proof that letting the FAIR Plan grow unchecked creates systemic risk.

Standing amid smoke, ashes, and uncertainty, I saw what failure looks like.

Ben AllenCalifornia State Senator

Allen has also legislated on the root cause. He authored Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond for wildfire risk reduction and water infrastructure — a direct investment in reducing the underlying risk that makes insurance expensive. Most Insurance Commissioner candidates talk about reforming rate approvals. Allen has already put $10 billion on the table to reduce the risk itself.

His plan for the office pairs regulatory flexibility for insurers with hard accountability: if they get more flexibility to reflect risk, they must write and renew policies in California. He also wants an independent consumer advocate inside the CDI, public dashboards tracking insurer behavior, and a ban on Commissioners working for the insurance industry after leaving office.

We gave the edge to Wolff because the Insurance Commissioner is fundamentally a regulator, and Wolff's technical insurance expertise is unmatched in this field. But Allen's legislative track record, coalition-building skill, and personal connection to the crisis make him an excellent candidate. We'd be happy to endorse him in a general election matchup.

Why not Jane Kim?

Jane Kim is a career politician who went from being a San Francisco Supervisor, to losing her run for State Senate, to running a socialist political party (the Working Families Party), and now wants to nationalize the insurance industry. She has zero relevant experience in insurance, no insurance license, and no financial services background. She's running on a plan called "Disaster Insurance for All" — a government-run program that would replace private disaster coverage. You'd pay a fee based on your home value and income, and the state would cover wildfires, earthquakes, and floods.

Her plan reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what insurance is. Insurance works by spreading risk across a big pool — including global markets that can absorb huge losses. Kim would dump all of California's disaster risk onto one state-run account. In theory, a government insurer could buy backup coverage from global markets the way New Zealand does. But in practice, politicians won't let a public insurer charge what the risk actually costs — that's the whole reason they created it. Florida proves the point: its state-run insurer pays market rates for backup coverage while charging customers about half what it should. Taxpayers cover the gap.

We've already seen this movie in California. The FAIR Plan — the state's existing backup insurer — got hit with $4 billion in losses from the LA fires, ran out of money, and had to charge private insurers a $1 billion emergency fee just to stay alive. That's with only 610,000 policies. Kim wants to put every California homeowner on a plan like this. The models she points to aren't success stories either — New Zealand's earthquake insurer was overwhelmed after the 2011 Christchurch quake, underpaid people for over a decade, and is now getting sued.

There's also a massive subsidy problem. Under Kim's plan, San Franciscans would hugely subsidize people who choose to live in wildfire zones. You'd pay based on your home value and income — not how dangerous your location actually is. So someone in a dense city neighborhood pays into the same pot as someone who built a house in a canyon that burns every few years. That's backwards. Insurance prices are supposed to make people think twice about building in dangerous places. Kim's plan removes that check entirely, which means more people move to fire-prone areas, more homes burn, and San Franciscans pay even more to cover it. It's as if she designed her policy to do the most harm.

Kim's plan would pull all disaster coverage out of the private market — the exact part that's in crisis — and put it on the state's books. Private insurers would have no reason to stick around for the low-margin stuff that's left. The next big wildfire or earthquake means either a massive taxpayer bailout or a wave of unpaid claims. San Francisco voters who want a working insurance market should look elsewhere.