February 29, 2012
Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman dropped a bomb on the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association (TWIA), recommending it be restructured to address the long-term sustainability of the program. As is often cited, TWIA was originally intended to be an insurer of last resort to coastal citizens who had no option to obtain private homeowners’ insurance elsewhere. However, [...]
February 28, 2012
It’s a fair question, and one I’ve asked myself on a number of occasions. The question keeps coming up, in part, because the NAIC keeps changing its answer. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that acts as the public policy trade organization of the nation’s state and territorial insurance regulators. [...]
February 28, 2012
Dealing with insurance-related credit scoring is like playing whack-a-mole: whenever one effort to ban the generally beneficial practice is defeated, another one pops up. At the National Conference of Insurance Legislators’ Spring Meeting, where I was last week, there was lots of debate and discussion relating to credit scoring for insurers and, in particular, proposals [...]
February 24, 2012
The Florida House of Representatives has passed legislation by an 89-25 margin that would limit Citizens Property Insurance Corp.’s ability to assess private insurers’ policyholders to make up for shortfalls at the state-backed insurer. Sponsored by Rep. Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, H.B. 1127 reduces the post-event assessments that Citizens can lay on other insurers’ policies in [...]
February 23, 2012
Writing at National Underwriter’s PropertyCasualty360 site, Robert Regis Hyle, editor-in-chief of Tech Decisions magazine, sees the future of auto insurance dominated by “telematics,” those advanced modeling systems that incorporate GPS and on-board computers to measure driving behavior. Pioneered stateside by the likes of Progressive, telematics has more recently been making an impression abroad, as well. [...]
February 22, 2012
Greetings from unseasonably warm Florida, where citizens are beginning to petition Al Gore to host a global warming summit to hopefully attract a Nor’easter to cool us off a bit. Late last week, Floridians saw the national business publication the Wall Street Journal chime in on an issue that is very Florida-specific. In its Feb. [...]
February 21, 2012
There’s an elephant in the room I probably should mention: someone impersonating a Heartland Institute trustee defrauded Heartland last week, stole internal documents and created one outright fake. The identity thief has since been revealed to be Pacific Institute President Peter Gleick, although he insists that he “received” the fake document in the mail anonymously [...]
February 20, 2012
Calling the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association’s present structure “unsustainable,” Texas Insurance Commissioner Eleanor Kitzman has put forth a proposal to hire consultants to reduce the state-backed insurer’s exposure and “improve service to policyholders.” Noting that the residual market entity’s share of the Texas market has grown to 57.2% in 2010 from 17.9% at the turn [...]
February 20, 2012
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal weighed-in on Florida’s insurance crisis, shedding light on the concerns economists, actuaries, insurance experts, consumer advocates and Heartland Institute analysts have been warning about since former Gov. Charlie Crist drastically and dangerously expanded the state’s role in the property insurance market. In a Feb. 17 editorial, the Journal [...]
February 17, 2012
In a special dispatch from the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference – held Feb. 9 to 11 in Washington D.C. – this week’s episode of the FIRE Podcast features Center on Finance, Insurance and Real Estate Director Eli Lehrer on a CPAC panel on the dangers of over-criminalization. Other panelists included Mary Schmid Mergler, senior [...]
Twitter
RSS
Facebook
