Inside Florida's home insurance meltdown

This episode delves into the critical issues and systemic failures plaguing Florida's home insurance market, exacerbated by climate change and litigious practices.

1. Florida's home insurance market is severely distressed, with skyrocketing premiums and insurers withdrawing.
2. Litigation and scams, particularly the "Florida roof scam," significantly contribute to the insurance crisis.
3. State interventions have been implemented, including legislative changes to reduce frivolous lawsuits and manage the state-backed insurer's policyholder numbers.
4. Climate change exacerbates the situation by increasing the frequency and intensity of hurricanes affecting Florida.
5. The episode emphasizes the need for comprehensive policy reforms to address both immediate and systemic issues in the insurance industry.

1: Hurricane Impact

Discusses Hurricane Ian's devastating effects on Florida, emphasizing the role of climate change in intensifying storm impact. Ben Walsh: "Ian dropped 20% more rain due to the warming climate."

2: Insurance Crisis

Explores the rising costs and challenges of obtaining home insurance in Florida, including insurer withdrawals and the increase in litigation. Amy Keene: "Rates have skyrocketed, and several national insurance carriers have even left the state."

3: Legislative Response

Details legislative efforts to mitigate the insurance market crisis, focusing on reforms aimed at reducing litigation and scam prevalence. Ben Walsh: "It's a billion dollars in state funding to help support the insurance industry."

1. Review your insurance policy annually to ensure it meets your needs at competitive rates.
2. Consider mitigation measures to protect your property from storm damage, potentially lowering insurance costs.
3. Stay informed about state insurance regulations and how they impact your premiums and coverage.
4. Explore state-backed insurance options if private insurance becomes unaffordable or unavailable.
5. Participate in community advocacy groups to push for more effective insurance regulations and fair practices.

Florida owns a massive property insurance company that’s been gobbling up policies while rates rise and some private insurers leave the state. A deal struck by the state legislature last year aims to fix this insurance market meltdown. To understand what’s happening – and what’s being done to fix it – we talked to former State Senator Jeff Brandes and insurance industry expert Mark Friedlander.

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People

Amy Keene, Ben Walsh, Mark Friedlander, Jeff Brandes

Companies

Citizens Insurance

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Mark Friedlander

Content Warnings:

None

Amy Keene

B r A Z e N.

Residents in Florida are used to hurricanes and tropical storms. But in September 2022, the west coast of the state experienced one of the most devastating hurricanes in years. Hurricane Ian hit the west coast of Florida and then it slowly moved inland. That's closer. Reporter Ben Walsh.

Ben Walsh

And when a hurricane hits coastal areas of Florida, you get homes that are washed away. We are still tracking hurricane ian restrengthening in the Atlantic, but look at some of this new video just coming in. This was of a home that was getting swept away in Fort Myers, Florida. Roofs that are blown off. Oh my God.

And a storm surge that causes massive flooding in coastal areas. What was beachfront property now underwater with. Fears of more catastrophic flooding to come. And what made Ian so unique was that it kept going inland and it slowed down and it dropped 20 inches of rain over parts of Florida. And so there was massive flooding inland in places that are far away from the coast and in places that don't normally experience that kind of devastation from hurricanes and flooding.

There were calculations that were done showing that Ian dropped something like 20% more rain due to the warming climate. So it was a massively devastating storm, and it was significantly more devastating because of the amplifying effects of climate change.

Amy Keene

Usually after hurricanes like Ian, homeowners file an insurance claim for repairs and rebuilding. But in recent years, getting that insurance has become more expensive and more difficult. Rates have skyrocketed, and several national insurance carriers have even left the state. So will a deal made in the Florida legislature be enough to curb the state's insurance meltdown before the next big storm? This is the closer.

I'm Amy Keene.

Hello listeners. Before we start today's episode, I wanted to let you know about a limited series on AI from our friends at the Masters of Scale podcast. In this series, you'll get a front row seat to fascinating discussions with some of the world's leading minds in AI, like computer scientist Fei Fei Li, entrepreneur Mustafa Suliman, and adept AI co founder David Wyan, among other AI trailblazers. And the best part is youll walk away with game changing analysis from masters of scales host legendary investor Reid Hoffman, along with brand new insights on how to use AI in your work. You wont want to miss this limited series on AI for masters of scale, so be sure to search masters of scale wherever you get your podcasts.

Amy Keene

The closer is brought to you by progressive. Most of you aren't just listening right now. You're driving, cleaning, and even exercising. But what if you could be saving money by switching to progressive. Drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average, and auto customers qualify for an average of seven.

Discounts multitask right now quote today@Progressive.com dot progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. National average twelve month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. Getting insurance in the state of Florida has become a real headache.

Property owners in multiple states are facing skyrocketing premiums and hard to get coverage. But the insurance industry itself says Florida's market is in full meltdown. The Florida insurance market has been in the process of melting down for years now. You have a number of factors that are part of that meltdown. Big national insurers like farmers have left the state first.

Tonight, another insurance company is leaving Florida. The state estimates 100,000 Florida families are about to lose their homeowners insurance when farmers leave. And some have cut Florida policyholders from their insurance roles. And since 2017, almost a dozen insurers that offered home policies in the state have simply gone out of business. And more are teetering on the brink.

Ben Walsh

And beyond the big names that are fleeing the state. The insurers who are still there writing policies are jacking up their rates and sticking many homeowners with premium increases of 40% or more. This is happening to people all over the state. Lutes resident Mary Kilgore's premium went from one thousand nine hundred dollars to four thousand three hundred dollars. And Angela Moya in Volusia county went from 700 to 1500.

So it's a real mess. And homeowners are just paying more and more and more. You can imagine compound a 40% increase over three or four years, and it's a real bite.

Amy Keene

Insurance is meant to offer homeowners some protection against property damage. You pay a relatively small premium upfront, usually, and the insurance provider is meant to cover, at least in part, the more substantial repair costs that could come later. And the insurance company makes money by insuring enough people with homes in enough different areas and different kinds of risk, and maybe even they dabble in different kinds of insurance policies to spread the risk even further, that no one storm event or in any one year is so significant that they're out of business. And so the idea is to spread the risk and allow the person who's taking on the risk to make a profit as they're doing it. But the irony in Florida is that this insurance is costing more and more each year.

Now, insurance is required for homeowners who have a mortgage on their home. But it's becoming less affordable for these homeowners, forcing some to leave the state altogether. Homeowners are facing really tough questions, and a lot of people are trying to shop around to see if they can get a better rate. A lot of times that's not available. There are some parts of the state, particularly in very storm prone areas of Miami, where people are seeing such dramatic increases in their rates that they are choosing to leave.

Ben Walsh

And you're also seeing a real difficulty in prospective home buyers, because obviously, when you're buying a home with a mortgage, you need to have the insurance lined up. And so that's basically a cost of closing, to have homeowners insurance. And if you're closing on a $350,000 home and all of a sudden the insurance is $12,000 and interest rates have gone up, the cost of closing on that home is much higher. And so you are seeing cases in Florida where real estate agents are saying, hey, I've lost multiple closings this year because everything was lined up, and then the cost of home insurance pushed things over the edge and the buyer backed out. No other state in the country is anywhere near this.

I recently spoke to insurance policy expert Mark Friedlander about this. Mark has been in the insurance industry for almost two decades and runs communications for the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. He says that while hurricane risk in Florida is very real, the insurance market. Is out of whack, even if you. Take into account the state's extreme weather.

Mark Friedlander

Yes, occasionally states will have bad years. Louisiana had a historic level of hurricane activity back in 2020. They're going to post a very bad result for the industry there. That's understandable. But Florida, year after year, and many of those years have zero hurricane activity in the state doesn't make sense.

So it's a real problem because it's becoming unaffordable. The price of real estate has skyrocketed here in Florida because of demand. But now we're hearing from the real estate community that are very concerned that their buyers of properties can't find affordable insurance. The meltdown in the Florida property insurance market started after an earlier hurricane hit the state in 2017. This one was called Irma.

Ben Walsh

Hurricane Irma is now the most powerful. Hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. On its current path, Hurricane Irma is aiming for Florida. Welcome back, everyone. South Florida, just hours away now from taking a direct hit from Hurricane Irma.

So Florida had this string starting a little more than a decade ago. Of a pretty long period with no significant storms making landfall, which for the state is great news for property owners and for insurance companies because property owners are paying their insurance premiums, insurance companies are collecting them, and they're not having to pay out massive storm damage claims. And then that string of years without large storms is broken by Hurricane Irma. And Hurricane Irma was a significant storm that caused lots of damage. But at that time, the Florida insurance market was fairly sound.

He learned about hard work, and before. Irma and before the meltdown started, a state senator was elected in Florida named Jeff Brandis in 2012. A leader who brings people together. He is a relatively younger politician or ex politician now. He left the Florida legislature last year, and he is very much a sort of centrist republican and is a big believer in market based ideas and market based solutions to policy questions.

Ben Walsh

And he now runs a think tank focused on Florida state policy issues. I served in the legislature for twelve years, and now I'm the president of the Florida Policy Project. Florida has a state owned, not for profit insurance company called Citizens, which is intended to be a property insurer of last resort. And by the time hurricane Irma hit, citizens had about 450,000 policies, which is in the ballpark that Brandis and others think is a reasonable number of policies for it to have. And I really use citizens as a barometer for the health of the overall property insurance market in the state of Florida because I think it's very helpful to do that.

So what begins to change is that the private insurance market starts its meltdown. And what ends up happening is that there's a massive increase in litigation against private insurance companies. Private insurance companies start dropping people from their roles. They start raising premiums dramatically. They start, in some cases, as we discussed before, pulling out of the state entirely.

And as a result of that, citizens, the state owned not for profit, starts gobbling up massive numbers of homeowner policies in Florida. And crucially, they are policies that are concentrated in the most populous parts of the state. This is southern Florida, Miami Dade, the Tampa area. And so they have this really concentrated risk, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. You mentioned litigation.

Amy Keene

I think this is a good place to get into one of, like, the crucial driving forces in the property insurance meltdown. Insurance scams. Tell us about these insurance scams. Yeah, so this is a huge problem, and it has its own name, the Florida roof scam. A study commissioned by a political action committee in Florida found property insurance companies paid $15 billion in litigated claims since 2015.

Ben Walsh

At one point, insurance companies were being sued 900 times a month in Florida. Florida alone was responsible for 80% of all insurance lawsuits filed in the US. And here's how it worked. So roofers would go and offer to inspect homeowners roofs for free, and they'd say, lo and behold, there's damage and that your roof needs to be fully replaced. And they would pressure the homeowner to sign a contract giving the roofer the right to file an insurance claim for them.

And this is called an assignment of benefits. It's a crucial part of the deal. The insurance company sends its own inspector out and they find no damage. And then the contractor links up with a somewhat unscrupulous trial attorney and they sue the insurance company in court. And the insurance company doesn't want this headache and says, okay, I'm just, I, I'm settling.

And so what ends up happening is that huge amounts of Florida homeowners get new roofs replaced for free, but obviously it's not actually free. And what does the insurance company end up doing? Well, it does two things. One is that when these cases are filed, largely they settle them. Cause they don't want the headache and they don't want the cost associated with a knockdown, drag out court battle.

Importantly, one of the reasons they don't want to go to court is because in Florida at the time, if a homeowner sued an insurance company and won, the insurance company was on the hook for the homeowner's legal bills. So you're just getting compounding costs here, and the insurance company wants no part of it. And the other thing that they did is they said, well, the cost of business in Florida is going up dramatically. Rates have to go up dramatically. So they started jacking up rates and they also started pulling out of certain areas, trying not to grow, you know, not renewing policies, all kinds of tactics to shrink the risk associated with this roof scam problem.

Amy Keene

Okay, so, ben, the question that I have is, what's the precedent for this? You said something like 80% of all us property litigation happened in this period in Florida. Is this normal? Absolutely not. No.

Ben Walsh

There are other states in the US that are obviously very close to Florida that have similar, although maybe not as high, storm risk as Florida does. So think parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, parts of Alabama. They see none of this litigation activity. And this was a point that was driven home to me by Mark Friedlander, and he knows a ton about the role litigation has played in the meltdown that's happening. The extreme level of litigation in Florida is something we've never seen before in us history.

Mark Friedlander

On average, more than 100,000 property claim lawsuits being filed against Florida insurers, accounting for nearly 80% of all us property claim lawsuits. So clearly out of whack Florida. Of every five lawsuits, only being filed in Florida didn't make sense. And then we had claim fraud where we had these schemes. For example, contractors going door to door, soliciting business to replace roofs that don't need replacement.

Now, certainly if a roof gets damaged in a windstorm or a hurricane, that should be covered by your insurance wear and tear is not covered. And that's the scam that's been taking place in Florida for many years with these unscrupulous actors are literally going door to door in communities, including my own home. I've had numerous unscrupulous contractors come to my door. Ben, it seems like it's kind of risky to open the door in Florida. It does seem that way.

Ben Walsh

And it was pretty funny. Mark was aghast that one of these people would come to his home, and I think he made it not worth their time. I live in a subdivision of about 750 homes, and I could safely say two thirds of those homes have gotten free roofs over the last five years. Where homeowners are being roped into deals they don't understand, they're signing away their rights to a claim, thinking, this is the greatest deal I've ever heard of. And the old saying, when it's too good to be true, it probably is.

Amy Keene

Because basically, what he's just described to us is this, like, really ridiculous scenario where there's like, if I may say, con artists going from door to door. What is it about the state of Florida that seems to sort of foster this mode of business? Yes. So this whole package of insurance litigation issues, it basically stems from specific Florida laws that are very generous towards homeowners in terms of how they interact with their insurance companies, and then also fairly deferential to trial attorneys. And so you put those two things together, and you have this sort of toxic brew.

Ben Walsh

And one of the things that really stuck out to me in talking to Mark and to Jeff is that these scams and this insurance litigation problem, it is a policy problem, and the policies create the opening. But the proliferation of it is a learned behavior. And so there's massive amounts of discussion and networking among trial attorneys. Contractors use this tactic, don't use this tactic. You know, there's these things that Mark discussed where if a roofing company is replacing a homeowner's roof for free through this insurance litigation process.

They'll require that the homeowner allow them to place a sign in their yard saying, this homeowner's roof is being replaced for free through insurance. If you want this, call this number. So there's this kind of social aspect of it that really sort of takes hold and it becomes its own self perpetuating industry in the state. I think we've got a really good sense now of the very Florida specific scam that is driving these increase in rates. But all of this is happening against a much bigger, quite pervasive issue, which is the increasingly changing climate, which has the potential to bring increasingly violent storms to Florida.

Amy Keene

What is the role that climate change is playing in these increased property insurance rates? Climate change is very much the sort of Damocles in this story. It's hanging over everything. It means that when major hurricanes hit Florida, they're more damaging. It means that major hurricanes are more likely to hit Florida more often in the coming years.

Ben Walsh

And it also means that when major hurricanes do hit, the kind of damage that they do is different. And the areas that were impacted were not just the coastal zones that get buffeted with high winds and a storm surge. And the sort of classic images of a hurricane hitting Florida that we think of what happened with Ian is that it hit the middle of Florida's west coast and then it slowly crawled inland and just dumped massive amounts of rainfall as it crawled across the state. And so flooding did a huge amount of damage far inland as well. When Ian hit, officials say more than.

$207 million in claims have already been paid out by insurance companies. The damage is estimated to be more than $100 billion in the state. Remember that, Ian, was the hurricane that hit just last year. So, Ben, this brings us back to citizens. This is the so called insurer of last resort in the state.

Amy Keene

But in the midst of the roofing scam, in the midst of recent hurricanes, how significant of a role is it playing in Florida? Yeah. Citizens is now the state's largest home insurer. Part of that is because other insurers have left the state. But another part of it is that they're often able to undercut private competitors.

And the company itself is in rocky shape. Here's Jeff Brandis again. Right now, citizens is at 1.5 million policies. They're sitting on 810 billion dollars of cash, which sounds like a lot of money, but when you look at it overall, they have $500 billion of total exposure out there. And so they're incredibly risky.

Jeff Brandes

And again, we would never let a property insurance company, the officer insurance regulation would never let a property insurance company that was in the private market do what citizens is doing today. It's kind of unfathomable that they would have that kind of risk profile. At the same time, they're not able to raise their rates at the levels that they know they need to. In fact, they have requested to raise rates higher, but have been turned down by the Office of Insurance Regulation. So what does this mean for all of these homeowners that are relying on property insurance by a state back provider that is in such a tricky position?

Well, what it means is that citizens is at a very real risk of not being able to pay out on insurance claims if a major storm hits the densely populated areas where it has a lot of policies and does tens of billions or 100 plus billion dollars in damage, which is not unfathomable. That's something that Ian did, and we've seen it before in Florida. So it's a very real possibility that citizens might not be able to pay out on its claims. Even the governor, Ron DeSantis, has admitted this. If you did have a major, major hurricane hit with a lot of citizens property holders, it would not have enough to pay out.

Ben Walsh

And what's really interesting is what happens if citizens can't pay out. And that's a very specific process that's mandated by law. And what happens is that first citizens goes to all its policyholders and says, you have to pay a surcharge. That's up to 50% of your current policy in order to help us make good on the claims that have come in. And if that's not enough to pay out the claims that citizens has, which it very well might not be, citizens is allowed to go to every single insurance holder in the state of Florida, home and auto and other kinds of insurance policies, and say you have to pay a premium to citizens.

So basically what's happening there is that if citizens is put in a position where it can't pay out, Florida taxpayers, specifically Florida insurance customers have to put the money on the barrel and help them out. It makes you wonder, what's the point of paying the premium alone if that's not enough to cover the insurance you think you're getting? That's right. And that is a point that Jeff Brandis made, which is that when you think about it, citizens policies are not actually insurance because they're not based on the actual actuarial risk of the property. They're a different kind of financial support for Florida homeowners, but they do not function like private property insurance does.

Amy Keene

This takes us to December 2022 and a special session of the state legislature to try to tackle Floridas insurance problem. We were looking at the imminent collapse of a substantial number of companies leaving Florida. Well, be right back.

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Amy Keene

With the Florida property insurance market melting down, last year, state legislators finally intervened. The Florida special session that happens in December 2022 really comes about as the Florida insurance market is melting down. Rates are rising as we've talked about, citizens is gobbling up tens of thousands of homeowners a month on their rolls. Things are looking pretty bleak. Insurance companies are leaving, they're folding.

And Jeff Brandis calls for a special session and says, we've got to sit down and take this issue on and figure it out because this cannot go on. Now, remember, at this point, Brandis is still a state senator, and he's among those calling for a special session to fix things because things have gotten so bad. There's a first special session in the spring, but that doesn't lead to a fix. Things keep getting worse. How bad?

Brandis makes a pretty dramatic comparison. The state of Florida essentially had stage four cancer in its property insurance world. And in the first special session, they decided to treat the flu. They didn't make any of the major changes that needed to be done. They tried to give it some medicine, but none of the substantial things that needed to be done were accomplished.

Jeff Brandes

And the patient got sicker between the first special session and the second one. And they realized, you know, listen, the whole market could die off here if we don't ultimately fix it. And so they came in and did kind of the major surgery that has should have been done years ago that they knew that needed to be done, but they ultimately got the political courage and will to do it in December. And so in December of 2022, the governor and the heads of the state legislature sit down and basically figure out a way to prop the insurance market up. The deal the state legislature reaches with the governor includes three big things.

Ben Walsh

It's a billion dollars in state funding to help support the insurance industry. Litigation reform. This is key. Homeowners are now barred from signing away their right to file an insurance claim over to a contractor or a lawyer. And insurance companies no longer have to pay policyholders legal fees.

And the third thing was to start kicking people off of the citizens insurance companies roles. The bill that came out of the session mandates a strategy called depopulation, which sounds really draconian. When David Bryant received a depopulation notice. In the mail from citizens insurance, it didn't come as a total surprise. There's been a dance with me going on citizens and going off as citizens.

In practice, what it means is that any homeowner that can get a private policy that's within 20% of what they are paying its citizens is required to take the private policy. And private insurers sort of come in and are able to look at the citizens books and decide which homeowners they might want to go out with offers to. And private insurers then notify homeowners that they'd like to take over their policy. If it's within 20%, the homeowner has to take it.

And one of the things that really allowed this deal to come together was that the previous leadership of the two chambers of the Florida legislature had been unwilling to address the issue. But what happened was there was a change in the leadership, and that Brandis said that basically was what made the deal happen, was new legislative leaders came in, and that changing of the guard allowed them to sit down and hash out a deal with the governor, which was the kind of pact that the previous leadership had not been willing to do. Why were they so unwilling? Well, one of the things that brand has pointed out is that there's no one in Florida who's pointing towards a grand vision of what the insurance market in the state should look like. And so there's no path forward that doesn't involve some very hard choices and for sure, some significant short term pain for either taxpayers in terms of doling out state funds to support the industry, or to insurance customers in terms of rising premiums.

And so it's the sort of policy conundrum where legislators can't make everyone happy, and they certainly can't make homeowners, which are very powerful constituency happy, and they also certainly can't make trial attorneys, who are very generous donors to a lot of their campaigns, happy by changing anything. They can make the trial attorneys happy by not doing anything. So a bill is one thing, but actually putting this into practice is another matter, and this is a really big problem to be solved. What effect have the components of this deal had on the property insurance meltdown? It is a massive problem, and as we've talked about, it was building for years and years.

And the bottom line with the special session bill is that it's kind of working, but it's slowly working. Rates are still rising in a huge clip. You know, some homeowners are still seeing those 30% to 40% annual increases, but there are now private insurers coming into Florida, and citizens roles are finally starting to fall. So there are new providers coming back into the state or perhaps coming into the state for the first time. Yes, it's remarkable.

And Mark Friedlander said that that's one of the most positive things that he's seen out of the legislation. I'll give you two examples. One is six new companies have been approved by the state regulator to start writing property insurance in Florida. And that's just in the last few months, the last several years, no company wanted to touch Florida. There's no way any company that's writing business in another state would come to Florida and say, oh, we want to be there.

Mark Friedlander

Nobody wanted to be here because it was an unprofitable situation. But now companies are literally knocking on the door of Florida, saying, we'll write in Florida. We feel we could write profitably in Florida because of the legislative changes. And what does Brandis make of the deal that was struck and the effect of it today? Well, he thinks that basically it was a huge step forward and that there are still some significant things that need to happen.

Jeff Brandes

You know, this is a huge ship. It's going to take a long time to turn it. And if you get a wrong speaker or wrong Senate president and they're unwilling to fix any of these problems, then that could delay us two years. Which really means two years of legislative delay is really a four year market delay. Right.

Because it takes two years beyond the implementation time of this. And I think that's the challenge. While things are improving its citizens, there is still reason to be worried. The US Senate recently started an investigation into the insurer to try to understand its liabilities. The Senate wants to find out if another big storm could push citizens over the edge and force Florida to ask.

Ben Walsh

For a federal bailout. What does this mean for homeowners when the next potentially big storm hits the state? What it means for homeowners in the short term is that rates are going to continue to go up and that if they're a citizen's customer that it's very likely that they will be approached by a private insurance company to replace their citizens policy. And what it means when the next big storm hits is that there's a huge amount that's dependent on how on many people transition off of citizens and onto private insurers before that big storm hits. So if the next big storm hits 18 months from now, that's better than the next storm hitting six months from now.

But that time delay is not that useful if hundreds of thousands of people in the meantime are not shifted onto private insurance. So that's really the key, is how many policies can move from citizens to the private market and how quickly. This is very much a Florida story, and you've described for us why it has been unique to the state. But in the context of climate change and of natural disasters hitting the state, we've seen over the last several years, in particular this last summer, that there are many other parts of the country that are being affected by natural disaster. Is this a sort of cautionary tale for other parts of the country when it comes to property insurance?

I think it is in the sense that it's an indication that climate change is going to test the policy framework for insurance in your state. If there are sort of gaps or weak points in the insurance market in your state, they either need to be filled as soon as possible and new policies need to be put in place to strengthen the insurance market. Or if a disaster hits, those weak points are going to be exposed. So Mark Friedlander made the point of Colorado, which has obviously seen a lot of fire related catastrophe, putting in place legislation recently to create a new state backed insurer of last resort as a way of strengthening its insurance market. When you sort of step back after having been looking at the story in such detail, what do you make of it, or what do you sort of take from this particular story in Florida?

I think that the key takeaway from this is that private markets can be extremely disjointed from the public good, and we know that. But this really shows the extent to which some unscrupulous actors can really push the boundaries of the legal system to exploit policies that were put in place largely with good intentions, and then once that begins to happen, how difficult it is to change the system. Jeff was talking to me about how one of the real advantages that the trial attorneys and their allies had in sort of preventing reform was that they didn't have to do anything. All they had to do was nothing, and things worked out great for them. And so, yes, they spent a lot of money to try to influence things in the state government.

But at the end of the day, all they needed to win was for nothing to change. And the reformers needed to put together a package that really shifted things dramatically. And that is always much, much harder to do.

Amy Keene

There's much more from this episode coming this week for Brazen plus subscribers on Apple Podcasts. Now that's it for this episode and for the third season of the closer. It's been such a pleasure to bring you stories of deals that have have changed the world this year. Since we launched in February, we've produced more than 35 episodes, plus a ton of bonus episodes. And as we wrap up this season and this year, we want to thank you for spending your precious time with us.

We see you in the comments and in the weekly numbers, and boy, do we appreciate you. And for one last time this season, I want to thank the brilliant team that makes this show every single episode. The closer is a production of Project Brazen in partnership with PRX. Our shows produced by Jay Venables, Isabel Kirby McGowan, Trina Menino, Anna Muto and Jessica Martinez de hosts. Ben Walsh is our reporter, Marian Hell Gonzalez is our project manager and Lucy woods is head of research.

Megan Dean is programming manager and Ryan Ho is design lead. Golda Arthur is our showrunner, and Bradley Hope and Tom Wright are executive of producers. Our marketing consultant is Maggie Taylor. And I'm Amy Keene. Thanks for listening.

Ben Walsh

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Amy Keene

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