The Quiet Office that Prices Your Life

You do not vote for your insurance company, but you do vote for the person who decides how much it can charge you.

That is what is on the November 3rd ballot when Georgians choose their next Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner. It is one of the least understood offices on the ticket and one of the most expensive to get wrong. The commissioner impacts the price of nearly every policy you hold.

This year’s race pits incumbent Republican John F. King against Democratic challenger Keisha Sean Waites. King has held the job since 2019 and is asking for a second full term. Waites is a former state representative and Atlanta City Council member making her case for change.

For a Fayette County household with cars, a mortgage, and a family health plan, the commissioner’s decisions affect all three bills. Given how far this office reaches into a household budget, it is worth taking a close look at what the commissioner does, what King has actually delivered, what Waites is promising, and whether either candidate is talking honestly about why your insurance bills keep going up.

What Does The Insurance Commissioner Actually Do?

Georgia is one of only eleven states that still elects its insurance commissioner rather than appointing one. That makes the office directly accountable to voters, and it makes this election a rare chance for the public to weigh in on insurance policy without going through the legislature.

The Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire regulates the companies that sell coverage in Georgia. Its core responsibilities include:

• Reviewing insurers’ rate filings and deciding whether the increases they request are justified.
• Licensing and monitoring insurance companies and agents doing business in the state.
• Investigating fraud, consumer complaints, and insurers that fail to pay valid claims.
• Overseeing fire safety inspections and the state fire marshal’s office.
• Running Georgia Access, the state’s health insurance marketplace.

It is just as important to understand what the office cannot do. The commissioner does not write law. Many of the biggest levers over your premium, including which rating factors insurers may use and how aggressively rate hikes can be blocked, sit with the General Assembly. The commissioner also cannot force a company to sell coverage in Georgia.

The Incumbent: John King

John King came to the office under difficult circumstances. Governor Brian Kemp appointed him in 2019 after his predecessor, Jim Beck, was suspended and later convicted on federal fraud charges. King graduated from Albany High School, began his law enforcement career as an Atlanta police officer in 1985, and rose to become police chief of Doraville. He came up through the Georgia National Guard, commanded the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, and retired in 2023 as a major general in the U.S. Army after a final assignment to NORAD and U.S. Northern Command. He won a full term in 2022.

His path to this year’s race was not a straight line. King announced in 2025 that he would run for the United States Senate but then dropped that bid and returned to seek re-election as commissioner a few months later.

I contacted King’s campaign several times over multiple weeks to request an interview and to give him the chance to answer direct questions about auto, home, and health insurance in Georgia. I received no response. Because of that, the account of his record below is built entirely from his press releases, his public statements, rate data, and the reporting of other Georgia outlets.

The Challenger: Keisha Sean Waites

Keisha Sean Waites has spent more than a decade in and around elected office. She served three terms in the Georgia House representing southeast Atlanta from 2012 to 2017 and then won an at-large seat on the Atlanta City Council in 2021. She resigned that seat in March 2024, partway through her term, to run for Fulton County Superior Court clerk. She has also run for a string of other offices, including Fulton County Commission, Fulton County Clerk, two congressional seats, and, in 2025, the Public Service Commission, a race she lost that I covered previously.

Her platform for insurance commissioner centers on affordability and on who bears the cost of risk. She has pledged to push to outlaw the use of ZIP codes and credit scores in setting premiums, to challenge rate hikes she considers unjustified, and to create a task force targeting scams aimed at seniors and other vulnerable residents. She has said she would work with the Republican-led legislature and operate within the state’s recent lawsuit-reform law rather than trying to unwind it.

Unlike King, Waites’ campaign did respond to my interview request and initially agreed to answer questions in writing. Those answers never arrived. Her positions here are therefore drawn from her public platform, campaign statements, and prior reporting rather than from any additional information provided to The Citizen.

Waites also carries an ethics record that voters should know. In 2022, the state ethics commission fined her $5,000 for failing to file required campaign finance disclosures during her City Council race. More recently, an Atlanta ethics ruling determined she owed the city roughly $25,000, plus a $5,000 fine, for using taxpayer money to print and mail newsletters that benefited her campaign. She has appealed that ruling.

The Issue: Auto Insurance

Auto insurance is the market King has made his signature issue, and it is the one where his statements are easiest to compare against reality.

Let’s start with what Georgia drivers actually pay. 

The average cost of full auto coverage in Georgia rose about 20% from 2023 to 2024, faster than the national increase of 15% that year. Georgians paid roughly $2,815 a year on average, well above the national average of about $2,313. One industry analysis found Georgia was among just six states where average premiums jumped more than 50% between 2024 and 2025. By 2026, Georgia drivers were paying close to 50% more than the national average.

Overall, these are not good numbers.

King’s central response has been to seek more authority and then tout reductions. In 2023, he championed House Bill 221, which gave his office the power to review all auto rate filings before they take effect. He described it as closing a loophole insurers had used to raise rates by as much as 25% in a single filing. That was a significant expansion of the office’s power while addressing a genuine problem. In 2024, King warned that a single carrier had pushed cumulative increases toward 40% for the year.

Then came lawsuit reform. In 2025, King was a leading advocate for Senate Bills 68 and 69, the tort-reform package Governor Kemp signed. King told reporters he expected the reforms to produce rate reductions of 3 to 5%, and he warned insurers not to come to his office asking for large increases now that their chief excuse was gone. In a February 2025 legislative hearing, King conceded he could not guarantee that rates would fall and predicted a slow decline rather than an immediate drop.

Late in 2025, the announcements began. King’s office reported that State Farm would cut auto rates by a total of more than 10% over the year, which the office estimated would save policyholders roughly $190 per insured vehicle. In December, he announced reductions from three more companies, including about 6% from Liberty Mutual. In May 2026, another carrier filed a 9% decrease. His office tied these reductions to the tort-reform law he backed.

Supporters of the law say the evidence is arriving. The R Street Institute has argued that tort reform deserves a victory lap, pointing to MARTA’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget, which forecasts $27 million for casualty and liability costs, as a sign that liability exposure is stabilizing. The Georgia Public Policy Foundation has made a similar case.

It is also where an inconvenient detail appears. In that same accounting, the commissioner’s own office credits not only lawsuit reform but also regulatory negotiations and anti-fraud efforts for the improved environment. The office is spreading the credit around. King, on the campaign trail, has not.

Here is where the claim meets reality. Those reductions are real, but they came after years of some of the steepest increases in the country. Overall, they claw back only a portion of what drivers had already absorbed. Georgia auto premiums remain far above the national average even after the cuts. Independent experts have been skeptical that tort reform is the cause, noting it can take years for lawsuit changes to move premiums and that tariffs and repair costs are pushing the other way.

The deeper problem is that nobody has actually measured it. Georgia trial lawyers, who opposed the bill and have an obvious stake in the argument, claimed lower premiums were not backed by studies or real numbers when the insurance industry lobbied for it. They also note that the broader empirical record is mixed with some research finding that tort reform mainly widens insurer profit margins rather than producing meaningful savings for policyholders.

The most telling evidence comes from King himself. In December 2025, after Democrats posted strong results in off-year elections, King announced he would push to cap the excess profits that auto insurers earn, pointing out that other states had done so and seen rates fall. That is a striking move for a commissioner who had spent the year crediting his own reforms with fixing the market.

Waites approaches auto from a different angle. Her focus is not the size of the bill but the factors that decide who pays it. Her signature proposal is to bar insurers from using credit scores to set premiums. A 2023 Consumer Federation of America study found that drivers with poor or fair credit pay substantially higher premiums than those with excellent credit, regardless of their driving records. In Georgia specifically, a driver with poor credit pays about $3,321 a year for full coverage compared with about $1,714 for a driver with excellent credit and an identical record.

Waites is also against using ZIP codes for premiums. That proposal deserves particular scrutiny in Fayette County because eliminating geographic rating could have different effects in a relatively lower-risk market.

Insurers price by territory, and they do it using claim frequency, theft, repair costs, and traffic density in the area where a car is garaged. Fayette County sits outside the metro core on most of those measures, which is a significant part of why a Peachtree City driver and a driver 20 miles north with the same record and the same car do not pay the same premium. 

Waites is proposing to end that distinction, which could directly raise your rates.

The Issue: Home Insurance

For years, Georgia homeowners had it comparatively good. The state’s average home premium has long been among the most affordable in the Southeast. But what has changed is the trajectory. Georgia home premiums have climbed roughly 24% since 2023 and are projected to rise another 10% by the end of 2026.

The cause is not hard to identify. Hurricane Helene struck Georgia in September 2024 as one of the deadliest and costliest storms in the state’s history. Idalia and Milton added to the losses. Fayette County was spared the worst of those storms, but homeowners here pay into the same statewide risk pool as the counties that were not, which causes a premium in Peachtree City to increase in response to the damage done hundreds of miles away.

King’s record on the home side is mostly a story of not making things worse. Georgia law does not let the commissioner reject a rate increase outright, though the office can limit increases and hold hearings. Analysts have noted that Georgia’s regulatory friction spreads rate increases over multiple years, which cushions the blow compared with a state like Florida. The same reporting also notes Georgia insurers have consistently paid out more in claims than they collect in premiums. Georgia rates are cheap relative to other states because they are low relative to the actual risk, which means the pressure to raise them is not going away regardless of who holds the office. King has publicly acknowledged the pressure on homeowners and said all options are on the table.

That said, King’s tort-reform promise applies here too, and it has not obviously delivered on the home side. The reforms were sold in part as a way to relieve pressure across all lines of insurance, and homeowners have not seen their premiums fall.

Waites has said her ban on credit-based and ZIP-based pricing would extend to homeowners policies, not just auto. But home premiums in Georgia are being driven up by catastrophe losses, not primarily by credit scoring. Changing the rating factors could genuinely help lower-credit homeowners, but it would do little about the underlying reason the whole market is getting more expensive.

The Issue: Health Insurance

Health coverage is where King’s signature claim comes under the most strain and where the numbers heading into 2027 are the most alarming.

The centerpiece of Georgia’s approach is Georgia Access, the state-run marketplace that King’s office oversees. Georgia moved its individual market off the federal HealthCare.gov platform and onto a private-sector model in which consumers shop through web brokers, insurers, and agents rather than a single government exchange. The state paired it with a reinsurance program projected to lower premiums by around 10%. King and state officials have pointed to rising enrollment as proof the model works, and enrollment has in fact grown substantially.

But enrollment is not the same as affordability or coverage. Georgia Access now covers about 900,000 Georgians, and their premiums are set to rise sharply. State data show approved 2027 increases ranging from about 11% to 29% on top of steep increases that already hit for 2026. Two major carriers, Cigna and UnitedHealthcare, are leaving the marketplace for 2027.

The human cost is already visible. Every self-employed contractor, early retiree, and small business owner in Fayette who buys coverage without an employer is in this market. A hospital lobbyist estimated that Georgia hospitals lost about $441 million after the 2026 price spike pushed people off the exchange and into the ranks of the uninsured. Health-policy researchers warn the market is shrinking as healthier people drop out, which pushes premiums higher for everyone who remains.

The biggest driver here is not King. The largest single force behind recent spikes is the expiration of enhanced federal subsidies that Congress allowed to lapse. An estimated 1.4 million Georgians will pay more as a result, and some individuals have seen extraordinary increases once the subsidies vanished.

What King can be held to is the design of the system Georgia chose to run. Georgia Access leans heavily on commissioned agents and brokers rather than neutral navigators. Analysts at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned that an Atlanta consumer would face more than 1,500 individual agents and brokers with no guarantee any given one sells every available plan. Public comments filed on the model argued that brokers are incentivized to favor the plans paying the highest commissions over the right coverage.

Waites’ platform does not lay out a detailed strategy for this market. Her stated priorities on the health side are the same two she applies across the board — a rate-freeze initiative that aggressively reviews and challenges unjustified increases and a task force to shield seniors and vulnerable families from insurance scams. She has pledged more broadly to challenge rate hikes she considers unjustified. What she has not offered is a plan for the parts of this market that drive the price.

What All This Has Cost You

Strip away the press releases and the campaign language, and the question for a Fayette County household is simple. What has this office cost you?

Here is King’s record in what you actually pay using the best public figures I could find:

• On auto, the typical Georgia driver was paying around $2,815 a year for full coverage by 2024, and even after the recent reductions, Georgia rates now sit close to 50% above the national norm. The most publicized of those reductions returned about $190 per vehicle to State Farm customers, but that is a fraction of what had been added on the way up.
• On home, a Georgia homeowner has seen premiums climb roughly 24% since 2023 with another 10% projected by the end of 2026.
• On health, families buying their own coverage face average increases near 20% for 2027 on top of last year’s jump with two major insurers leaving the local market.

Yikes.

What Should We Make Of This?

I have spent two weeks on this article without any cooperation from the two people asking for the job. I researched it to death, and what I did not find, anywhere in that work, is either candidate talking about why any of this is actually happening. And the longer I looked, the more it frustrated me.

This is bigger than one race or these two names. Look at what is actually driving your bills up.

• Storms are getting worse, and insurers here pay out more in claims than they collect, which means our rates are artificially low and have nowhere to go but up. 
• Congress walked away from the health subsidies that were holding those premiums down, a decision made entirely outside this