Opinion Insurers’ excessive profits are secret no more | Editorial

By Sun Sentinel Editorial Board | Sun Sentinel

PUBLISHED: September 21, 2026 at 2:51 PM EDT | UPDATED: September 21, 2026 at 3:06 PM EDT

No precedent justifies the state Senate’s arrogant demand that the South Florida Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel destroy records exposing gross profiteering by Florida’s property insurance industry.

But it serves a useful purpose by showing dramatically how badly the scales in Tallahassee are tilted in favor of moneyed special interests and against the people.

An explosive report by the sister newspapers shows that lawmakers wore blindfolds of their own making — our state’s trade secret laws — when they claimed to “reform” the property insurance market four years ago.

Thanks to their own obsessive secrecy, they did not know about a secret report compiled for the Office of Insurance Regulation. It found that as the industry cried poor, 53 insurance companies overall claimed $432 million in losses while paying fees generating $1.3 billion in net income to their affiliates.

Rather than fix that, legislators obediently dried the industry’s phony tears. The changes they produced — supposedly to help people deal with rising property insurance costs — made it harder for them to sue insurers who lowball valid claims or refuse to pay altogether.

Cracking open state secrets

The coverup stayed secret for two years, until the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald obtained an executive summary of the OIR report through the public records law in 2025.

Outraged House members passed bills this year demanding more transparency of the insurers’ books and improving oversight of affiliate payments, but the Senate showed no interest. Key details that might have changed senators’ minds, such as the full, line-by-line OIR report on each company’s finances, remained secret.

So did the consultant’s conclusion that 20 companies were paying affiliates more money than Florida’s “fair and reasonable” legal standard. Fort Lauderdale-based Universal Property and Casualty Insurance Co. was one of them.

Following a public records request from reporters for the Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, the OIR released only a heavily redacted copy of the report, citing Florida’s trade secrets law for the censorship. But an unredacted copy was attached to an email the Senate provided in response to a separate public records request.

Profiteering, uncovered

In demanding that the newspapers destroy the unredacted copy, Senate counsel Tom Thomas described the release as an “inadvertent administrative oversight” and threatened prosecution if the newspapers don’t comply.

No matter. We obtained the full report lawfully. You can soon read the details and perhaps your own insurance company’s profit margin in our forthcoming series, “Uncovered.”

It is a well-traveled road for U.S. journalists, seeking to pry secrets loose from the government. Most famously, the massive report known as the Pentagon Papers was kept secret, to conceal how Americans were misled by their own government in Vietnam.

Back then, the Supreme Court ruled for the public’s right to know. The decision reiterated the court’s long-standing principle that “any system of prior restraint of expression comes to this court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity.”

Two justices, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, wrote that every moment’s enforced delay in publication was a “flagrant, indefensible and continuing violation of the First Amendment.”

If state Senate lawyers have never read that decision, now would be a good time.

Changes in law needed

It’s also time to tighten the public-be-damned state trade secrets law. Just about any business submitting documents to the state can designate contents as trade secrets. State agencies must accept that, and it can be a crime to divulge secrets “without authorization.”

An agency sued by the public to disclose supposed trade secrets must notify the source, who has 30 days to file a lawsuit to prevent their release. By law, a court can keep the entire proceedings secret, so there’s no way to know whether the judiciary is involved in protecting the insurance industry’s embarrassing secrets. (In an unrelated scandal, a Tallahassee judge is still suppressing the official grand jury report on Hope Florida, long after it was leaked.)

One of the laws says that “the public and private harm” in disclosing trade secrets “significantly outweighs any public benefit derived from disclosure, and the public’s ability to scrutinize and monitor agency action is not diminished by nondisclosure of trade secrets.”

That is nonsense. As this case reveals, the public’s ability is not only diminished, it can be erased.

In another case, the Tampa Bay Times reported that consumer advocates fighting Duke Energy over data centers claim the utility has used the trade secret exemption to conceal the true cost of data centers to consumers. The advocates know the figures, but deleted them from a public filing because of confidentiality demands from Duke’s lawyers.

The government keeps far too much information secret. In this case, thanks to a lot of persistence and a little luck, the people will win, just in time for the election.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.