California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara tried and failed to move hearings on insurance rate hikes online on Wednesday, citing supposed dangers since the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024.
In a letter to an administrative law judge in Los Angeles dated August 18, Lara’s attorneys claimed that there were mortal risks to holding hearings on insurance rate hikes in public.
They asked Judge Fredric J. Seligman to move a hearing about State Farm’s proposed rate hikes for fire insurance from an in-person proceeding to a virtual one, which would have barred the public from attending.
State Farm is asking Lara to approve rate hikes in the wake of the Palisades and Eaton fires. But a group of local residents, organized by former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Joy Chen under the Eaton Fire Survivors Network, is arguing that State Farm needs to honor its obligations to policyholders before raising its rates.
Lara’s lawyers asked that hearings on rates be moved online — citing, among other risks: “The recent stalking of the family of the United Healthcare CEO who was murdered by a disgruntled policyholder in Manhattan.”
The Eaton Fire Survivors Network mocked Lara and State Farm for comparing policyholders to murderers:
Yes — instead of seeing our complaints as evidence of misconduct, Commissioner Lara tried to spin them into a security threat against his own staff. And to really drive it home, they compared us to Luigi Mangione, the so-called “hot murderer” who assassinated a health insurance CEO in New York.
What?? Pause. We are parents. We are grandparents. We are neighbors and taxpayers. Sweet, slightly tired, post-menopausal us — hardly “hot” and definitely not violent. And yet our tax dollars paid for Commissioner Lara’s team to stand before a judge and argue that we survivors are a danger to public safety.
State Farm quickly piled on, insisting “it behooves the parties to accept [CDI’s concerns] as real.”
Ultimately, Judge Seligman rejected Lara’s request, saying that Lara had not shown “an unreasonable risk of imminent harm from in-person attendance.” He added: “Both the parties and the public share a vested interest in ensuring that transparency and fairness are upheld; not only in practice, but in perception.”
The hearing took place without incident.
Eaton Fire Survivors Network (Courtesy)
Judge Seligman also rejected Lara’s request to split the review of State Farm’s request into two parts — one dealing with the rate and one dealing with its conduct toward policyholders.
Policyholders hope that keeping the two parts together will help them hold State Farm accountable.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
