Cross your fingers, because Florida may have survived another hurricane season without a major storm. With about six weeks left before the official end of the hurricane season, forecasters say the state will exit 2012 without incurring significant losses from tropical storms. Twenty years after Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Florida, that should be good news.
When the first results started to come in from the 2010 Census, one trend made the headlines more than any other, it seemed. The first decade of the 21st century saw a 5 percent increase in the number of households inhabited by two unrelated adults. The increase translates into one out of every eight homes, and for insurance companies that means a lot of new homeowners, renters and auto insurance policies.
Piracy insurance is a relatively new idea, spawned by the Somali pirate takeovers of several ships in recent years. Marine kidnap and ransom insurance covers ransom costs and vessel recovery costs if a ship is hijacked by pirates. Florida has its own history of piracy, but modern piracy is a multi-billion dollar industry. And when insurance companies see losses, they see opportunities for their own profits.
Florida insurance regulators have successfully negotiated a settlement with another life insurance company over unpaid death benefits. As one of the six lead states in this effort and other insurance industry matters, Florida is making a name for itself as an enforcer. The direct benefit, if any, to Sunshine State residents is unknown, though.
Usually the “best” and “worst” lists come out closer to the end of the year. For insurance companies, though, the season came a little early this year. Researchers looked at market conduct reports filed in 2012 and came up with the most common complaints that regulators like Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation had about insurance companies’ processes.
We are still talking about a recent analysis of insurance companies’ market conduct reports. The researchers looked at property and casualty companies and life and health insurers to identify the areas that regulators most often cited as problematic.
Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and state insurance departments keep track of how well companies are complying with all those regulations. Every insurance company operating in the state of Florida is subject to a full market conduct review. The Office of Insurance Regulation determines how often the reviews are conducted, but state law dictates what the OIR reviews.
We are picking up our discussion from Sept. 20. We left off with some basic information about force-placed insurance, the profits it reaps for the insurers and the coverage gaps it results in for homeowners.
Following the traumatic events of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Congress created a risk-sharing program known as the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. This law will expire at the end of December 2014 and provides for federal backup for insurance coverage, eliminating the situation where many terrorism-related risks could not be insured because of their high premium price, causing insurers and reinsurers to decline to offer policies.
Thanks to the combined pressure of the Securities and Exchange Commission, insurance regulators from Florida and four other states, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and consumers, Assurant Inc. recently shared sales data for its force-placed insurance line. The company said it had collected $90 million in premiums from two of the four states that have questioned force-placed rates.
