The insurance claim form for the Titanic is going up for auction in the next week or so. It’s an interesting document, and not just for insurance types. The four pages completed by Second Officer Charles Lightoller offer a surprisingly clinical description of the disaster. Lightoller may have had a reason for his ho-hum tone, or he may have simply had a “Just the facts, ma’am” moment.
This week marks the 102nd anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. We wrote about some of the insurance issues a couple of years ago, when the disaster’s centennial prompted so much coverage. (See our April 2012, archive.) An auction house in England announced recently that it will be selling the original insurance claim form for Titanic at auction later in April. They expect to get about $20,000 for it.
We are still talking about litigation costs at Citizens Property Insurance Corp. The state-run insurance company is paying more than $2 million every month to defend itself in policyholder lawsuits, according to research conducted by a state legislator. The lawsuits are over claim denials, and critics are wondering why Citizens is choosing to litigate when paying the claims could cost less.
Depopulation is the wave of the present at Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. Earlier this year, the state’s insurer of last resort announced that it had shed enough policies to bring the total number of policyholders below the 1 million mark. Citizens hasn’t seen numbers like this since 2006, according to Insurance Journal.
We usually talk about consumers’ issues with insurance companies. Flood insurance, homeowner insurance, auto insurance and life insurance — these are topics that focus on Florida residents and their families. In this post, though, we have something for businesses: the fourth-quarter results of Towers Watson’s Commercial Lines Insurance Pricing Survey.
We are continuing our discussion of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a class action case against one of the manufacturers of Chinese drywall. The court has ordered that the company pay damages to the homeowners who were the named plaintiffs in the class action. The plaintiffs are not from Florida, but the decision clears the way for Florida homeowners to pursue the manufacturer for damages as well.
The Chinese drywall debacle should be well behind us, but homeowners in Florida and a couple of other states are still waiting for their day in court. Their wait should not last much longer, though, now that the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the second manufacturer of the defective drywall cannot remove the litigation to China and must pay damages to a handful of plaintiffs.
The former “King of Pop” Michael Jackson had fans throughout the world including in the Miami area. His untimely death came as a shock to many and so too likely did its cause. At the time of his death he was in the process of rehearsing for a concert tour that was being promoted by AEG Live LLC. As a part of the tour a non-appearance and concert cancellation insurance policy was purchased from Lloyd’s of London in June 2009.
There have been a few developments on the flood insurance front, and we will discuss those in future posts. There is more to Florida than its waterfront homes and coastal flood plains, though. We are also a state with a sizeable population of retirees and older people. And that means we have other insurance concerns.
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.
