Over the past couple of months, I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a new house – something to provide me with more space, more land, and, apparently, a lot more debt.
Well, at least I was.
Thanks to Oklahoma’s sky-high home insurance rates – the highest in the country under Insurance Commissioner Glenn Mulready – the amount of home Oklahomans can afford keeps going down and down, just as home prices and interest rates keep going up and up, resulting in thousands of Oklahomans struggling just to pay their current mortgage, let alone upgrade to a new one.
In a normal world, pricing people out of the housing market would be a cause for concern. But according to spineless Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Glenn Mulready, it’s actually a cause for celebration!
You see, because it's so easy and profitable to overcharge, rip off and price-gouge Oklahomans, insurance companies can’t move here quickly enough – a fact he bragged about in a recent House study.
Via Yawn Doc:
“We have a very competitive, vibrant free market happening..."
“We are maintaining a competitive marketplace here in Oklahoma,” Mulready told legislators. “The good news is we do not have companies leaving our state. We do have a couple who have left, but they have chosen to exit the homeowners insurance marketplace. We don’t have companies leaving our state. We allow companies to rate property for risk. If we were seeing substantial profits being made, this would be a different conversation.”
“So as long as we have a competitive free market happening, the laws say there is no such thing as an excessive rate,” he told legislators.
Yep, good news everyone being quoted $7,000 for a 2,400 square foot house in an Oklahoma City suburb.
You may be paying three times what someone in a neighboring state with an equal risk of damage pays, but guess what, you have hundreds of capitalistic companies lined up to rip you off. It sure would suck to live in a place where you simply saved socialistic money instead, huh?
In all fairness to Mulready, I can see where his capitalist credo comes from.
According to capitalist economics, when insurance companies compete, you’d think prices would go down, but according to a report by The New York Times and Oklahoma Watch, it’s actually the opposite. It’s almost like they know that anyone who carries a mortgage has to have insurance, so they just collude like a cartel to keep prices high.
“Whatever Patrick! Glenn made other points, too. It also has the ability to keep and bring jobs to the state.”
I agree. Moving to a state like Oklahoma to price gouge consumers seems like a good business proposition… if their employees could afford our high home insurance costs.
Anyway, you can read Mulready’s dumb, proven-wrong-by-statistics, bought-and-paid-for-by-lobbyists comments over at NonDoc. If you can score me a low home insurance rate, hit me up on the TLO Tip Line. Stay with The Lost Ogle. We’ll keep you advised.
