by Isabel Keane at New York Post
A State Farm executive has been fired after he was secretly recorded alleging that the insurance company hiked rates for California homeowners reeling from the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.
Haden Kirkpatrick, State Farm’s vice president for innovation and venture capital, thought he was on a Tinder date when he started talking about his company’s California subsidiary filing for an emergency 22% rate hike for its homeowners’ policies, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Kirkpatrick said the request was “kind of” orchestrated “but not in the way you would think,” according to the video published by James O’Keefe’s media company.
“Our people look at this and say, ‘S—, we’ve got like maybe $5 billion that we’re short if something happens,’” Kirkpatrick said in the video, recorded in January but published last week.
“We’ll go to the Department of Insurance and say, ‘We’re overexposed here, you have to let us catch up on [our] rates’. … He’ll say ‘Nah.’ And we’ll say, ‘OK, then we are going to cancel these policies.’”
Kirkpatrick was also recorded saying that homes should not have been built in the Pacific Palisades, the area most devastated by the fires…
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