With just two days left to write new laws in the 2025 legislative session, Louisiana lawmakers have halted the only two insurance proposals this year that critics said would have directly provided relief to homeowners struggling to afford skyrocketing rates.
Senate Bill 235 and House Bill 356 drew wide public interest as homeowners wait for state officials to rein in the coverage costs. Average homeowner insurance premiums in Louisiana are the eighth highest in the nation, according to the industry news site Insure.com.
Both were also among the few insurance bills that had bipartisan support, though not quite enough from conservatives.
Sponsored by Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, Senate Bill 235 would have created an annual tax credit of up to $2,000 for homeowner’s insurance payments. It would have been available to anyone with homeowner’s coverage and an income no greater than 200% of the federal poverty level. The legislation included a provision to sunset the credit after 10 years.
After narrowly clearing the Senate, Duplessis’ SB-235 narrowly failed in the House as Republicans there tanked it with a two-vote margin, 49-52.
The other measure, House Bill 356 by Rep. Jacob Braud, R-Belle Chasse, would have required insurance companies to let homeowners who are free of mortgages to purchase “stated value” policies. It would cover the home for a lesser amount chosen by the homeowner rather than for its full market value.
Although the bill is still alive, it’s a mere shell of the version that cleared the House in a 79-20 vote just last week when it drew strong vocal support from Republicans like Rep. Tim Kerner of Lafitte, who called it the only bill he has seen this year that actually helps homeowners with affordability.
The original measure would have required insurers to create stated value policies upon the request of a customer, but Senate lawmakers changed a single word in the bill — from “shall” to “may” — doing away with the mandate provision that served as the cornerstone on which the rest of the bill relied.
Rep. Mike Bayham, R-Chalmette, expressed his disappointment over the fate of the two bills in an interview Tuesday, saying the high cost of insurance is the one issue above all others that lawmakers really needed to fix.
“Everything else seems to be, ‘Let’s pass something and just hope the rates get better,” Bayham said. “I thought Braud’s bill was more direct, and I thought Duplessis’ bill would have provided direct relief even on a limited scale. At the end of the day, we were elected to the Legislature to tackle the insurance crisis.”
Tax credit crash
The version of Duplessis’ bill that reached the House floor would have capped the state’s total annual payouts for the homeowner’s insurance tax credit at $10 million. It also would have made the credit refundable for filers earning less than $25,000 per year, meaning they could have received a cash rebate for the credit.
However, Rep. Julie Emerson, R-Carencro, gathered enough votes for an amendment to remove the refundable provision and to lower the state’s payout cap to $1 million per year.
Rep. Neil Riser, R-Columbia, who presented the bill on the House floor for Duplessis, objected to those changes but lost that vote in a 65-29 decision.
“This bill is to try to help those who need the most as far as homeowner insurance is concerned,” Riser said.
Emerson said the bill would only shift the cost of high homeowner’s insurance to the broader Louisiana tax base while doing nothing to address the underlying causes of high rates.
“I don’t think that that gives a lot of incentive for rates to go down when we’re basically subsidizing those rates,” she said.
House Insurance Committee Chairman Gabe Firment, R-Pollock, who has spearheaded much of the pro-insurance industry legislation this year, rallied his conservative colleagues to oppose Duplessis’ bill by calling out one of the organizations backing it, the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance.
Firment took issue with recent text messages from the Alliance that accused lawmakers of doing nothing to pass meaningful insurance reform. He pointed out the group gave a poor rating to Republican Congressman Steve Scalise ahead of his 2024 reelection and a positive rating to the Democratic challenger Mel Manuel, whom Firment called a “radical transgender candidate.”
Questioning the relevance of those comments, House Speaker Phillip DeVillier, R-Eunice, began interjecting to ask Firment to focus his comments on the bill, but the Grant Parish lawmaker had made his point and yielded the floor.
‘It encourages you to gamble’
Meanwhile Monday in the Senate, members of the upper chamber were approving a neutered version of Braud’s legislation with little discussion. If signed into law, the Senate’s version of the legislation would make no changes to what is already allowed under current law.
Stated value policies are typically customized for homeowners who have paid off all or most of their mortgage and prefer to shoulder the risk of having only partial coverage. They would receive lower premiums in exchange for paying out-of-pocket for any damages, increasing the likelihood of losing their homes entirely in the event of a bad storm or a lawsuit.
In an interview Tuesday, Braud said there’s no law that would currently stop insurers from selling stated-value policies, but he wouldn’t go so far as to say the Senate changes rendered his proposal a “do-nothing” bill.
“We’ve gotta start somewhere,” the Plaquemines Parish lawmaker said.
Braud added that he believes passing the neutered version of the bill might not change anything this year, but it could help the idea of stated value polices gain momentum. Braud said he hopes he can get the word “shall” back into the law during next year’s session.
Pro-industry lawmakers such as Firment opposed Braud’s legislation, arguing it would shift insurance costs to other parts of the state that aren’t prone to hurricanes and would lead to an increase in blighted property from people abandoning their damaged homes after storms.
Ironically, the same group Firment criticized during debate on Duplessis’ bill is aligned with him in opposition to Braud’s bill.
In a phone interview Tuesday, Andreanecia Morris, president of the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance, said her organization is sympathetic to the plight of homeowners everywhere who can’t afford insurance, but she believes Braud’s bill doesn’t address the underlying problem of high rates.
“We’re not fans of encouraging homeowners to go it alone and not have enough insurance to replace their homes should the worst happen,” Morris said. “People can’t afford what they need, and that’s the issue. Solving that problem isn’t gonna be accomplished by just asking them to need less. It’s like asking them to breathe less.”
Lawmakers could be doing more to solve the problem and regulate the insurance industry, she said, adding that Braud’s bill could spell disaster if too many Louisiana residents go underinsured or drop out of the property insurance market altogether.
“It encourages you to gamble in a way that is unsustainable and could lead to you losing your home,” Morris said. “We learned those lessons after Katrina.”
Braud’s bill is scheduled for a conference committee on Wednesday in which a small group of lawmakers from both chambers try to work on a compromise to get the measure passed.