When you think about insurance for your home, you usually think about your property insurance and maybe mortgage insurance. (Mortgage insurance protects the lender if you die or become disabled.) In Florida, you’ll probably think about flood insurance, too. But would it ever occur to you to buy job loss, or “unintended unemployment,” insurance?
We’re taking a brief detour from Florida’s insurance woes today. We noticed a brief news article about an insurance company that’s taking full advantage of new technology while offering coverage to countries that have no insurance industry to speak of. The article talked about the insurance sale, but not claims payment, though, so we’ll leave that to speculation.
In our last post, we were talking about the fate of Florida’s homeowners insurance report card. Mandated by a 2007 law, the report card was intended to be a tool for Florida homeowners to compare insurance companies using just a few key measures. After years in development, the first report card was completed in December.
As the Florida Legislature works on bills to change the insurance market in the state, a state-mandated homeowners insurance report card dies a quiet death. Lawmakers approved the report card in 2007 to give Florida homeowners a way to compare insurers as well as to move insurers to improve their customer service.
The Florida Senate Banking and Insurance Committee has been busy lately. A bill that lawmakers hope will send Floridians away from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. made it out of committee on a 6-4 vote this week. If enacted, the proposed law would raise premiums and limit the types of coverage the state-run insurer could offer.
Lawmakers are delivering on their promise that insurance would be a major focus of this legislative session. A bill advanced in the Florida Senate recently that would dramatically change the way insurance companies institute rate hikes. The proposal would allow homeowners insurers to raise rates by a statewide average 15 percent above their current rates without prior approval of the Office of Insurance Regulation.
Proposed legislation that would substantially change existing insurance law barely made it out of the Judiciary Committee of the Florida State Senate this week. For some members of the committee, the bad faith provision of Senate Bill 1592 is especially troubling. The bill is supposed to encourage settlements “in a fair and objective manner,” according to the sponsor. Opponents, however, say the bill, in effect, is killing an ant with an elephant.
When a health insurer denies a claim, health care providers typically suffer the consequences. In some cases, the policyholder may pay the bill themselves. If not, doctors and hospitals end up losing revenue they are owed for services they provided. However, recent data collected by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggests that a denial of a claim for health insurance is not necessarily the end of the road. The report discovered that nearly 50 percent of rejected claims are actually reversed on appeal.
A host of life insurance companies announced recently that they are expanding their e-underwriting services to more states. The insurers hope that e-underwriting will speed up the process for term-life applicants enough to motivate even more consumers to purchase the coverage. In our last post, we talked about the service in general. This post is devoted to offering consumers a few things to think about before they go down the e-underwriting road.
The Internet is making serious inroads into the life insurance business, especially when it comes to term-life policies. Florida is just one of the many states where insurers are expanding their e-underwriting processes. It’s certainly faster, but consumers need to keep a few things in mind before they rush to the web.
