As we have said time and time again, insurance is all about risk. In some circles, “risk” is merely code for “gambling,” but the industry shies away from using the latter for some fairly obvious reasons. Imagine, for example, that your insurance agent asks you how much you’d like to bet that your teenager will crash the car or your neighbor will break a leg on your front steps. Risk is a much more palatable word.
Questions about insurance coverage often turn on small details. A decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — Florida is in the 11th Circuit — illustrates the point and offers insight into just how complicated insurance litigation can be.
Another 45,000 homeowners policies could be leaving Citizens Property Insurance Corp. in March. Florida’s insurer of last resort has been trying to shed policyholders and their risk for the past couple of years, and the Office of Insurance Regulation recently approved another “takeout.” We discussed the overall effort and the company’s goal of moving 400,000 policies to private insurers in our Sept. 27, 2013 post.
We are talking about a bad faith lawsuit that settled for $18 million. The case is not from Florida, but, as we said in our last post, it’s rare for even legal periodicals to write about these cases. That is not to say, however, that bad faith litigation is rare.
It isn’t often that an insurance bad faith lawsuit finds its way into the news, so when one does come up we jump at the opportunity to talk about it — even if it has nothing to do with Florida.
The results of a survey conducted on behalf of the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and Trusted Choice got us to thinking about what consumers know about their homeowners and auto insurance coverage. As we said in our last post, 61 percent of respondents were somewhat familiar or not familiar with the particulars of their policies.
If we have learned nothing else from all the news coverage of Healthcare.gov and rollouts of state health insurance exchanges, we have learned that most health insurance policies renew on January 1. If our health insurance is part of an employee benefit package, we probably renew our life and disability insurance at the same time. It’s routine.
Living without health insurance is like living life on eggshells. There really is danger lurking around every corner, a slip in the grocery store, a car accident or even a trip on a toy that sends someone down the stairs. Each of these could result in some massive medical bills that can be as damaging as any bodily injury.
Floridians received some bad, but not unexpected, news last week. According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ recent report, the state has the highest homeowners insurance premiums in the country. At $1,933 (in 2011, the most current year available), the average rate here is almost twice the national average.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners released its annual homeowners insurance rate report last week. Floridians will not be surprised to know that our average rate of $1,933 is the highest in the country — almost twice the national average and about four times as much as the lowest ranking state.
