Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

Florida hid insurance industry’s lies — and tried to stop us from revealing them | Column

tampabay.com · 17hShare

This past weekend’s newspaper carried a blockbuster exposé about how insurance companies — some of which jacked up premiums after claiming they were losing money in Florida— had been playing shell games with their profits. Records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel revealed that about 50 companies that claimed to have lost a collective $432 million from 2017 to 2019 had actually sent $1.3 billion to affiliated companies elsewhere. Theoretically, companies can set up and bill separate companies to do work for them. But the damning detail in this story is that the state’s own consultant determined that least 20 of these companies paid their affiliates more than the “fair and reasonable” amount allowed under state law. So they were breaking the rules while shifting more than a billion bucks elsewhere and then crying poor here in Florida, according to a report taxpayers spent $150,000 to produce. But the story got even slimier. First, the state tried to hide al

First report: Officials threatened to arrest reporters for spilling Florida industry's dark secret — rawstory.com, 1d