A onetime candidate for California insurance commissioner is taking aim at fellow Democrat Jane Kim, accusing the Bernie Sanders-backed contender of building her campaign on what he called “profound intellectual dishonesty.”
Kim, the former San Francisco supervisor who now heads the progressive California Working Families Party, is seeking California’s top insurance post in November as the state grapples with an insurance crisis intensified by a string of destructive wildfires.
Her sole opponent in the general election is Democratic state Sen. Ben Allen.
Patrick Wolff, who came up short in this year’s insurance commissioner primary, delivered the sharp criticism in a Wednesday opinion piece for the San Francisco Standard, even though he is no longer in the race.
Wolff, whose background is in banking and finance, said he closely reviewed the policy platforms of the crowded primary field, which included more than eight candidates. Most, he wrote, offered ideas for confronting California’s insurance troubles — even when he disagreed with their proposed solutions.
“Kim, by contrast, has campaigned on a platform of smoke and mirrors: big talk, little respect for the facts, and at times outright falsehoods,” he wrote.
Wolff tore apart Kim’s signature policy proposal — a single-payer disaster-insurance policy for every Californian dubbed “Natural Disaster Insurance for All.”
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The idea is to create a single state fund, rather than relying on competing private insurers, to cover disaster losses for everyone.
“Everyone would be in the same pool and pay premiums based on factors like property value or risk,” Kim’s website states.
Wolff blasted Kim’s references to other countries offering similar plans, noting that wildfire risk isn’t calculated into their programs.
“Kim’s idea of replacing private wildfire insurance with the state would put California taxpayers on the hook for untold billions,” he stated. “All she can say is that other countries do something similar. But that’s untrue: Her only real example is a program in New Zealand that is not at all like what she proposes and doesn’t even cover fire.”
The entire proposal includes no concrete details or cost figures, Wolff claimed, details that could potentially elude voters not paying much attention to the race.
He also blasted her other campaign policies, or the lack thereof, as evidence of alleged dishonestly.
Some of Kim’s policy proposals, Wolff claimed, are shams. For example, she promised to “stop insurers from using credit scores to deny coverage” — even though a rule is already in place.
The California Post contacted Kim’s campaign for comment.