A former candidate for California insurance commissioner has accused fellow Democrat and Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidate Jane Kim of running on a campaign of “profound intellectual dishonesty.”
Kim, a former San Francisco supervisor who leads the progressive California Working Families Party, is running for the state’s top insurance job this November amid a crisis dramatically worsened by devastating wildfires.
Her only other challenger in the general election is state Sen. Ben Allen (D).
Patrick Wolff, who lost in the primary for insurance commissioner this year, swung at her hard in a Wednesday op-ed in the San Francisco Standard despite no longer having skin in the game.
Wolff, who had a career in the banking and finance industries, said he had studied the crowded primary of more than eight candidates on their policy platforms. Most of them addressed the state’s insurance problems, he said, even if he disagreed on how.
“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.”
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.
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