Loopholes allow insurance companies to leave California homes unprotected: NYT

For hundreds of thousands of California homeowners who rely on the state's FAIR Plan, what was supposed to be an insurance pool of last resort has become the only option.

But state officials never intended that to be the case. Instead, "a series of loopholes quietly negotiated by the insurance industry" neutralized requirements that would've resulted in many of those homes being covered by traditional insurance companies, the New York Times reports.

Perhaps the most consequential loophole detailed by the Times involves the state's list of 662 "distressed" ZIP codes, which were supposed to be locations prone to disastrous fires that insurance companies would need to be incentivized to cover.

Some of those ZIP codes, however, were mostly fine, with only a small part of them deemed high-ri