Ahead of the June primary election, the Southern California News Group compiled a list of questions to pose to the candidates who wish to represent you. You can find the full questionnaire below. Questionnaires may have been edited for spelling, grammar, length and, in some instances, to remove hate speech and offensive language.
Name: Jane Kim
Current job title: Attorney/Consumer Advocate
Age: 48
Political party affiliation: Democratic
Incumbent: No
Other political positions held: Member of the San Francisco Board of Education, San Francisco Supervisor
City where you reside: San Francisco
Campaign website or social media: janekim.org
Why do you want to become the insurance commissioner? What does a commissioner do? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
I’m running for Insurance Commissioner because this underleveraged office could be a powerful platform for working families. Insurance determines who gets to build wealth by buying a home, driving to work, or opening a small business. Insurance must be affordable and available – otherwise, we are shutting everyday Californians out of the economy. Yet right now, premiums are too high, insurers are dropping customers, and even when we have insurance, they fight our claims every step of the way.
The Insurance Commissioner regulates a trillion-dollar industry and can propose and implement solutions to address the current system failures. I’ve spent my career taking on billionaire corporations and winning on behalf of working people. As Insurance Commissioner, I’ll fight to make insurance affordable and available for everyone.
I’m running to lower costs, expand access, and ensure insurance actually protects us. I am proposing transformative ideas – including creating a single-payer, Disaster Insurance for All program and expanding our low-cost auto insurance program – to invest in strengthening California’s infrastructure and resilience and make insurance more accessible.
When it comes to wildfire risks, how would you balance consumer protection with a functioning, competitive market? What would you have done differently to reform homeowners’ insurance following efforts to help L.A. rebuild from the wildfires? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
The private insurance model is built to price risk and avoid losses, not to reduce risk. In California, where wildfire and climate disaster risks are accelerating, insurers are pulling back from higher-risk areas—limiting new policies and shifting exposure off their balance sheets—while continuing to make substantial profits by investing our premiums in stocks and bonds. At the same time, they use climate disasters to justify raising premiums on their cherry-picked, lower-risk customers.
The system prioritizes profitability over long-term market stability. At its worst, insurance companies underwrite and invest in fossil fuel companies that drive climate disasters, while canceling coverage on homes destroyed by those same disasters.
We have socialized the costs of climate catastrophe but privatized the gains.
As a result, risk is neither managed nor reduced, and costs are borne by working people and the state of California.
A public, nonprofit disaster insurance system would do the opposite. Coverage would be automatic and universal, with everyone in the same risk pool and premiums based on property cost and risk.
Crucially, a public insurer would have to invest in prevention and resilience—fuel management, firefighting capacity, and early warning systems—to reduce future claims. It could also tie premiums directly to mitigation, giving homeowners clear, transparent incentives to harden their properties and communities to invest in defensible space.
The real difference is structural: a public system would address climate disaster instead of avoiding it. Ultimately, the goal is not just coverage, but to make us safer and more resilient.
The state’s Department of Insurance says it is holding insurers accountable with its new “sustainable insurance strategy.” SIS allows insurance companies to increase rates based on the growing threat of climate change, passing on to their customers costs for insuring high-risk homes. In exchange, insurance companies are expected to write more polices in fire-prone parts of the state, where they’ve ended coverage for hundreds of thousands of homeowners over the past decade. The goal of SIS is to help transition property owners off the FAIR Plan. Tell us why you do — or don’t — support this strategy. (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
I support the goal of stabilizing the market and moving homeowners off the FAIR Plan, but the Sustainable Insurance Strategy (SIS), as currently structured, does not achieve either.
SIS allows insurers to raise rates based on growing climate risk in exchange for writing more policies in high-risk areas. In practice, however, insurers have continued to drop high-risk customers while raising premiums on lower-risk homeowners. As multiple investigations have shown, companies have used loopholes to increase rates on “safer” customers while continuing to withdraw from fire-prone communities.
This approach does not make insurance more sustainable or Californians more resilient. Instead, it expands the number of homeowners who cannot access coverage at all, pushing more people onto the FAIR Plan rather than transitioning them off of it.
At its core, SIS still relies on a private insurance model designed to avoid risk, not manage or reduce it. Allowing higher premiums without strong guarantees of coverage or meaningful investment in risk reduction shifts more cost onto consumers without solving the underlying problem.
A better path is a public, nonprofit disaster insurance system that guarantees universal coverage and invests premiums in mitigation — home hardening, fuel management, and community resilience. That approach would stabilize the market, reduce long-term risk, and ensure that no community is left without protection.
Without structural change, SIS risks reinforcing the very failures it is meant to fix.
State Farm teetered on insolvency in the state after the L.A. wildfires. Everyone’s homeowners’ insurance policies rose this past year due to the consumer bailout of State Farm and the FAIR Plan, both of which sought huge rate increases. Is this fair to consumers who don’t live in fire-prone areas? Tell us why or why not. (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
The question isn’t simply whether it’s fair for lower-risk homeowners to pay more — it’s why consumers across the board are paying more while insurance companies continue to limit coverage and report strong profits.
Insurance was designed as a shared promise: we all pay into a system so that when the worst happens, we’re protected. Some level of shared risk is unavoidable. But what we have now is not a fair system. Lower-risk consumers are being asked to absorb rising costs, while insurers reduce their own exposure — dropping high-risk customers and concentrating on more profitable policies. People are paying more and getting less.
If Californians are being asked to shoulder broader risk, insurers must meet stronger obligations in return. That means writing policies in high-risk areas and not just raising premiums on low-risk households. Right now, we have the worst of both worlds: socialized risk for consumers and privatized decision-making for insurers.
We also need to recognize that climate disasters are not confined to one ZIP code. From Paradise to the Palisades, these impacts ripple across the entire state—affecting housing markets, mortgages, and public finances. And the burden falls hardest on low-income communities.
Fairness requires balance. Consumers should not be paying more without meaningful protections in return. We need accountability, coverage requirements, and a system that invests in prevention and resilience.
Catastrophe modeling is a computer-based process that simulates thousands of potential natural or man-made disasters to estimate potential financial losses. Do you believe California could utilize catastrophe modeling that could lead to rate increases for homeowners? Why or why not? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
We cannot and should not ignore forward-looking climate risk. The issue isn’t whether we use better data; it’s how that data is used.
Right now, catastrophe models are proprietary, developed and controlled by individual insurance companies with little transparency or public accountability. That creates a system where rates can rise based on models that neither DOI or consumers can fully evaluate.
If California is going to use catastrophe modeling, it must be transparent and publicly accountable. We should have a single, statewide model — developed with state scientists and researchers — that all insurers are required to use and that every Californian can access and understand. The problem isn’t forward-looking risk assessment; it’s opaque modeling that can be used to justify unchecked rate increases.
Modeling alone doesn’t reduce risk — it can make insurance more expensive and less accessible when used to justify higher premiums or coverage withdrawals.
A public, nonprofit “Disaster Insurance for All” program would use forward-looking models differently. Instead of identifying high-risk areas to avoid, it would use that data to target investment — fuel management, home hardening, infrastructure upgrades, and community resilience — so those areas become safer over time. The goal would be to reduce risk, not retreat from it.
Better data matters — but how we use it should be focused on protection, prevention, and keeping Californians covered.
The California FAIR Plan is the state’s insurer of last resort. Is it fair for the plan to charge people to recover losses on a $1 billion assessment to pay for L.A. fire claims, even when these same people weren’t living in the wildfire areas? Please explain why or why not. (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
The FAIR Plan originated as a civil rights initiative to counter insurance industry redlining in California. It’s operated by a consortium of private insurers and is more secretive and opaque than other states. As the insurer of last resort, it was never meant to become a climate disaster fund. Prohibitively expensive and inadequate, we must reform the current program.
I am proposing to:
-Restructure the Governing Board so it includes consumer advocates, homeowners, labor, elected officials, and independent financial experts—not just industry interests.
-Make it transparent. Decisions that affect the public should be made in public, and that goes for the Fair Plan as well. Governing board documents and basic financial data should be publicly available, and meetings should be publicly noticed, recorded and live-streamed, with minutes and public comment.
-Expand coverage. Californians are paying far too much for policies that cover far too little. The FAIR Plan can’t be the long-term solution for climate disasters. We should reform the FAIR plan in the short term while we build a Disaster Insurance for All system that reduces our reliance on the FAIR plan in the long term.
Shouldn’t major insurers like State Farm and Allstate be permitted to cancel policies and leave the marketplace? Why not just let them leave? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
We can’t simply allow insurers to walk away from California without consequences.
For decades, homeowners have paid premiums as part of a shared promise: that if disaster strikes, coverage will be there. These catastrophic events were once rare, and people paid into the system knowing they might never file a claim. Now that climate disasters are increasing and people actually need coverage, insurers are choosing to exit the market. That breaks the basic contract.
If companies want to leave, there should be real accountability. Insurers should be required to pay an exit fee, and they shouldn’t be allowed to cherry-pick which lines of business they keep. If they exit the homeowners market, they should exit other lines—auto, liability, workers’ compensation—as well. You shouldn’t be able to profit from California in good times and walk away when risk increases.
We need clear rules so insurers can’t hold the state hostage. If you want to do business in California—the largest insurance market in the country—you need to serve the full market, not just the most profitable segments.
At the same time, we must build public alternatives, like Disaster Insurance for All and a low-cost, nonprofit auto insurance program, so coverage is guaranteed regardless of private market decisions.
As of March, Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara is moving forward with finalizing new regulations to limit public oversight and transparency in insurance rate increases under 7%. A finalized rule effectively curtails public challenges to insurance rate increases by denying compensation to groups like Consumer Watchdog and other advocacy organizations. What do you think of this plan? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
Rate hikes, no matter how small, add up and impact every Californian. Limiting the ability of consumer advocates to challenge those increases weakens accountability at a time when we need it most.
Proposition 103 was designed to give the public a real voice in insurance rate decisions. It’s one of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country, and we should be strengthening it— not undermining it. Curtailing participation by groups like Consumer Watchdog reduces transparency.
If companies are asking for higher premiums, they should be able to justify them in a transparent, public process. Insurance companies should use premium dollars for their intended purpose: protecting policyholders. If they collect more than needed to cover claims and a reasonable profit, that money should be returned to policyholders or invested in resilience—not spent on excessive executive compensation, like the $27 million salary paid to one insurance CEO last year.
Californians deserve transparency. As Insurance Commissioner, I will require clear reporting on how premiums are spent, create a searchable public database, and publish an annual “Where Your Premium Goes” report— so people can see exactly what they’re paying for.
Car insurance rates are skyrocketing in California, with rates jumping over 30% since 2022, driven by expensive vehicles, complex repairs and new safety requirements. What could you do to contain auto insurance costs when a driver has no accidents? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
Auto insurance costs are rising unsustainably; it’s becoming unaffordable for Californians to own cars. But without broad public transit infrastructure, most Californians must drive in order to access jobs and participate in the economy.
We need stronger scrutiny of rate requests to ensure increases reflect actual costs, not excess profits. We also need to investigate insurance companies with high denial rates. And I am proposing to prohibit valid claims as a reason to raise premiums
Safe drivers should be rewarded with stable or reduced rates rather than getting hit with automatic premium hikes.
I am also proposing to expand California’s Low-Cost Auto Insurance Program and the number of Californians who qualify, and study Canada’s single-payer nonprofit auto insurance program to determine what we can learn from this model.
How do you think taxpayers could better understand the work of this office? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
The Insurance Commissioner’s office oversees a trillion-dollar industry that touches nearly every aspect of our lives. We are required to have insurance to participate in the economy—whether it’s owning a home, keeping a job, or running a small business. At its core, this office is the public’s watchdog—responsible for making sure insurance companies operate fairly, honor their contracts, and treat policyholders with respect.
I’m running to make this office far more transparent and accessible, starting with clear, public data. Just as insurers assess risk before offering coverage, consumers should be able to assess insurers before choosing a policy. I will create a public, searchable database with company-by-company claims performance, complaint data, and payout patterns—so people can make informed decisions about who they trust to cover them.
In the wake of disasters, I will require insurers to regularly report key metrics: number of claims filed, claims denied or closed without payment, and processing timelines. Californians deserve to know how companies perform when it matters most.
We also need visible accountability. Insurers that systematically underpay or deny claims are breaking their promise to policyholders. I will prioritize market conduct examinations of bad actors, coordinate with the Attorney General on fraud enforcement, and impose real consequences.
What’s a hidden talent you have? (Please answer in 250 words or less.)
I have a black belt in karate—and I will bring that same level of discipline and determination to make California more affordable for working people.
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