Democratic former Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards drew crowds and cameras as the keynote speaker for a panel on the insurance crisis in Louisiana last month on Tulane University’s Uptown campus.
Hosted by the Murphy Institute Center for Law and the Economy at Tulane, the forum featured a panel that included policymakers and representatives from nonprofit organizations.
Edwards highlighted key aspects of the crisis and criticized insurance companies for their bad-faith operations. After leaving office in 2024, Edwards joined Fishman Haygooda Louisiana law firm, where he focuses on renewable energy litigation as a special counsel.
The insurance crisis is “the single biggest challenge to the future of the state of Louisiana,” Edwards said.
The United States Census Bureau reported that Louisiana had the second-highest cost for home insurance. Edwards partially attributed Louisiana’s population decline to high insurance rates.
“Our former governor is in a unique position to be able to help us understand the crisis and what we and our government might do to respond to it,” panel moderator and law professor Adam Feibelman said. “He knows as much as anyone about the scope of the problem and especially the landscape of potential policy responses and what will be required to successfully pursue them.”
During his gubernatorial term, Edwards oversaw the disaster response to six hurricanes.
“I’ve walked through wreckage and seen complete devastation that these powerful storms leave in their wake,” Edwards said.
Edwards said that the storms and floods were often the first heartbreak that many Louisiana families would face. The next would be collecting their insurance claim.
“There’s nothing more gut-wrenching than when that basic promise, that basic obligation, just fails,” Edwards said. “I had grown people, senior citizens, literally cry, telling me that they couldn’t stay in the home that they had lived in for fifty years. They couldn’t get the insurance companies to perform.”
Edwards said the lack of response by lawmakers is a failure “from not fully understanding the industry’s business model.”
“Insurers operate more like investment firms,” Edwards said. “Policyholders pay premiums, and in a future date, insurers pay claims, but in the interim, the pool of money … is available for them to invest.”
Louisiana’s struggling insurance market remains one of the most pressing challenges the state faces, Edwards said.
“While I think there’s no shortage of opinions about what we should do with respect to insurance in Louisiana — affordability, competition, having insurance companies perform when you need them to — we can all agree that this is one of the biggest challenges facing our state,” Edwards said.
