Letlow campaigned on insurance accountability. Here’s what that should look like.

I spent five years living in a FEMA trailer. Not because I didn’t have insurance. I did. I paid my premiums and believed that if disaster struck, my insurance company would help me rebuild.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I spent years fighting to get paid. I went through adjuster after adjuster, submitted the same paperwork repeatedly and struggled to get straight answers. Even after mediation and reaching agreements, the payments didn’t come.

Then my insurance company went bankrupt.

For years, that company took our money when the skies were clear. When the storm came, and the bill came due, it folded. The people who ran it moved on. The people who trusted it were left in trailers.

Mine wasn’t the only one. After the 2020 and 2021 hurricanes, about a dozen homeowners insurers went under, holding nearly 185,000 policies. Some had been handed policies from the state’s own program, plus grant money. Yet they sold coverage in a hurricane state without enough money set aside for a hurricane.

That isn’t bad luck. That’s how the business was intended to run. 

Premiums got collected. Claims never got paid. Mine was FedNat. Its CEO collected nearly $10 million over five years, then resigned two months before the company was declared insolvent, with a $1.2 million payout to boot. 

Somebody made money. It wasn’t the families who were owed. 

When a company fails, the state is supposed to catch us. Make sure the market works. 

My claim went to the Louisiana Insurance Guaranty Association, LIGA.

It sounds like a safety net. It wasn’t. 

LIGA doesn’t honor the bankrupt company’s promise. It pays only up to a cap set by law, and it pays none of the penalties and attorneys’ fees a homeowner would have won against an insurer that stalled in bad faith. 

The day FedNat went bankrupt, every consequence for the year it stalled me disappeared. I had to hire an attorney to keep fighting, this time against the state’s own guaranty fund. 

A policyholder shouldn’t have to fight LIGA in federal court just to get a business to honor (a portion of) the contract it signed. Isn’t LIGA supposed to be for policyholders?

And who pays for LIGA? Not the executives whose companies collapsed. LIGA assesses the insurers still standing, who recoup it through state tax credits. So the bill lands on Louisiana taxpayers and policyholders. The companies are gone, and tens of thousands of families ended up in the same line I stood in. 

So when Julia Letlow ran for the U.S. Senate promising to hold big insurance companies and FEMA accountable, I paid attention.

Letlow is right: Louisiana has an insurance crisis. But affordability is only half of it. What good is insurance you can afford if the company’s executives can run off with millions and deny paying when your home is destroyed? 

For survivors like me, accountability starts with homeowners insurance, and the state’s promise to deliver when a company fails. 

To start with, who let these companies run away with tens of millions in profit while homeowners were left with nothing? Why should Louisiana and its homeowners pay for their business malpractice? Those questions have never been asked under oath.

Secondly, a guaranty system that worked would give policyholders what they were promised: a full, adjusted claim on time with the same bad-faith penalties the company (and its executives) would have faced. That’s not what we have seen from LIGA.

Finally, we know federal flood insurance has been rigged against Louisianans for decades, with rates rising 18% a year even as the state invests billions in new flood works. 

Letlow knows it too. In 2022, she signed a letter asking FEMA whether the upgraded New Orleans levee system even counts in its pricing formula. She never got a straight answer. That question is still unanswered, and Louisiana families are still paying the rates.

I’ve met other survivors who’ve spent years fighting insurance companies to rebuild. We’re speaking out and organizing because we’ve been through too much to sit quietly and hope somebody else fixes this.

I can’t get back to the five years I spent in a FEMA trailer. But I can fight so other families don’t go through what I did.