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The petitioners said they claim exoneration from liability for any and all losses or damage from the event and from any claims for damages that have been or may be [...]

Best's Review contributor Ojusvi Chauhan is an advocate who practices law in New Delhi, India, focusing on insurance dispute resolution and representing some of the world's largest insurers and reinsurers [...]

Social inflation continues to test the ability of casualty insurers with unpredictable and excessive claim costs, David Blades, AM Best associate director of industry research and analytics, and Justin Aimone, [...]

Artificial intelligence is likely to transform how insurance companies underwrite risk and engage customers, but regulators will monitor issues regarding how data is used to reduce the potential for discrimination [...]

Hurricane Ian. Winter Storm Elliott. A blizzard warning in California. A deep freeze in Texas. The insurance industry is no stranger to the challenges of catastrophic storms, frigid temperatures and [...]

Insurers should fight back and not always give in to unreasonable settlements that are a prime factor in the rising tide of litigated claims, according to Rick Lindsey, Prime Insurance [...]

Under terms of the new law, producers will be required to act in the best interests of clients by disclosing how the transaction would benefit them and revealing any hidden [...]

The bill would bar life insurers from nonrenewing or rejecting applications based on genetic characteristics, genetic information or the result of any genetic test not in a medical record as [...]

When a company faces a catastrophe and a wave of potential civil cases, John 'Jack' Delany and Kristen Worley, co-chairs of Marshall Dennehey's catastrophic claims litigation group, said they look [...]

Teresa Chan once helped Native Americans improve economic opportunities and worked to develop renewable energy programs for them. She assisted in creating business plans and raised funds to facilitate business [...]

While insurance is decentralized and regulated at the state level in the United States, the Federal Reserve is tasked with providing additional oversight on some of the largest U.S.-based companies. [...]

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry recently signed a raft of four bills aimed at stabilizing the state's property insurance market, including one that allows carriers to nonrenew up to 5% of [...]

At $2.1bn, cat bonds will be TWIA's biggest source of funding for 2024 Artemis Asia Pacific: ADB says silver generation could generate additional productivity Asia Insurance Review The federal government [...]

The bill would give carriers authority to not renew up to 5% of their policies and carriers would be able to ask the insurance commissioner's office to allow for greater [...]

The bill would allow the Missouri Farm Bureau to offer personalized policies, providing preventive care, hospitalization and emergency services, to its members. A GAO report cautions about potential consumer risks [...]

Key Points Dealing With Changes: Risk management has become a juggling act for the industry as it deals with constant changes and inconsistencies in COVID-19 guidance and regulations. Facing New [...]

MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, when companies clash with a regulator, the regulator comes out on top. Even without any action taken, the knowledge that a company and its activities are [...]

As insurers respond to demands for greener investing, they are learning the historical trade-off between values and profit is diminishing, but regulation remains an obstacle. 'There is this misconception, as [...]

Throughout his distinguished career, Michael Harrington has worked to elevate the importance of risk management in the ever-evolving aerospace sector. As vice president of risk management and assistant secretary at [...]

Insurers are focusing on risk management, while raising rates and lowering limits on child abuse and molestation coverage, said Aaron Lundberg, president and chief executive officer, Praesidium. When it comes [...]

The recently enacted $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expected to generate large investments in the transportation and energy sectors and result in more business opportunities for surety [...]

A selection of stories from publishers around the globe. Access to some sites may require registration or subscription. Ambassador Fund invests in first cat bonds, renews Consulate ILW deal Artemis [...]

The diversity of the Asia-Pacific insurance market, specifically regulated mature and emerging regional markets, has produced sophisticated risk and capital management processes, said Rob Curtis, managing director, market development, Asia-Pacific, [...]

How much capital and surplus should insurance companies be required to hold? The answer to that question can tell us a lot about the trajectory of insurance regulation in the [...]

After nearly 20 years of watching European insurers make better use of their capital by safely transferring off old parts of their businesses, their American counterparts appear poised to start [...]

Population aging causes financial imbalances in pay-as-you-go public pension programs. To remedy this problem, while ensuring the adequacy of retirement savings for employees, many countries complement or substitute public pensions by regulating their workplace pensions. This article exploits a pension reform in Taiwan that has mandated, since 2005, that all private-sector employers contributeatleast6percentofanemployee's monthly wage to an individual pension account. I use workers in the unaffected sectors as a comparison group and employ a difference-in-differences method to estimate the impact of the reform on household saving rates. My estimates suggest that making private pensions mandatory significantly reduces the household saving rate by between 2.06 and 2.45 percentage points, thus implying that a $10 increase in the workplace pension could offset $5 to $6 of household savings., INTRODUCTION There are several reasons why individuals may not have enough savings for retirement; for example, a lack of self-control in relation to spending means they do not have enough [...]

The Affordable Care Act's medical loss ratio (MLR) provisions require that health insurers spend a minimum percentage of premiums on medical costs, thereby limiting administrative costs and profits. Analyses of annual MLR changes indicate that plans both below and above the minimum MLR manage their ratios toward the minimum standard. Our finding that plans with excess MLR manage their MLRs downward suggests that compliant plans exploit their MLR 'cushions,' thus increasing profits while typically continuing to satisfy the MLR requirement. We show that 52 percent of noncompliant plans in a given year subsequently become compliant, while 14 percent of compliant plans subsequently become noncompliant., INTRODUCTION The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) is among the most significant and controversial pieces of legislation enacted in recent U.S. history (Diamond, 2011). In addition to its [...]

This article examines how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would change financial resources for and transfers to the previously uninsured if they were to purchase coverage in the ACA insurance exchanges (marketplaces) in 2014. The results suggest that the law provides gains to some, relative to their spending in the pre-ACA period, particularly those in poor health and with very low incomes, but it also potentially imposes financial losses on many, again compared to their experience when uninsured. We estimate changes in expected payments--defined as premiums plus expected out-of-pocket costs--from purchasing coverage and paying cost sharing post-ACA, relative to expected out-of-pocket payments when being uninsured pre-ACA, across population subgroups characterized by income, age, and health status. We also estimate changes in expected transfers to the previously uninsured under alternative assumptions on how much health care spending increases after the ACA., INTRODUCTION A major objective of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was to increase the take-up of insurance and thus to increase the total amount and types of medical care used [...]

Hong Kong's insurance regulator has launched a groupwide insurance supervision framework while working on a regulatory regime for groupwide insurance-linked securities business in the wake of legislative amendments. 'The GWS [...]

Captive insurers are attracting greater interest in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, as regulation develops and counter-party risk concerns increase. Recent market and regulatory changes show captives are becoming increasingly [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic will continue to dominate in 2021, but a backlog of unfinished business--such as risk-based pricing and racial justice issues--also will fill state legislative and regulatory agendas this [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic casts a giant shadow as the U.K. and European insurance markets navigate current economic, regulatory and political issues, according to AM Best analysts. Coverage problems brought up [...]

The use of recreational marijuana has been legalized in 19 states and the District of Columbia, with more states considering the possibility, according to the National Organization for the Reform [...]

Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John King has ripped into Allstate Corp.'s 25% automobile insurance rate hike, saying it will burden consumers already dealing with inflationary increases on everyday [...]

The explosive 2018 grand jury report detailing sexual abuse of children by hundreds of priests in Pennsylvania tore open old wounds for some victims and created a healing environment for [...]

We study theoretically and empirically how consumers in an individual private long-term health insurance market with front-loaded contracts respond to a newly mandated portability requirement of their old-age provisions. To foster competition, effective 2009, the German legislature made the portability of standardized old-age provisions mandatory. Our theoretical model predicts that the portability reform will increase internal plan switching. However, under plausible assumptions, it will not increase external insurer switching. Moreover, the portability reform will enable unhealthier enrollees to reoptimize their plans. We find confirmatory evidence for the theoretical predictions using claims panel data from a big private insurer., Introduction Very few countries in the world organize their health insurance system around private health insurance markets. Even in the United States, the leading example of a largely private system, [...]

In the United States, variable annuities (VAs) are popular long-term personal investment vehicles. Recently, however, sales have begun to dwindle. In fact, financial advisers have long argued against investing in VAs due to the products' high fees. VA providers charge these fees--typically at a constant rate throughout the policy period--to cover their expenses and the costs of embedded guarantees, and lowering this constant fee rate could make the VA unprofitable. Instead, we propose and analyze a simple change to the fee 'structure' that would lower fee rates overall (and thus make the product more attractive to investors) without reducing the insurer's profit. The key insight is that this time-dependent fee rate (with moderate frontloading) implicitly discourages policy lapses and exchanges, which reduces the providers' policy acquisition expenses. Taking into account financially optimal lapse (and reentry) decisions, we determine the optimal timing and rate of the fee reduction for a competitive as well as for an innovative VA provider. An important characteristic of this feature is that it can be implemented easily and effectively to both new and existing VA policies., Introduction In the United States, variable annuities (VAs) combine the investment features of mutual funds with favorable tax treatment and return guarantees (Hardy, 2003). Over the past two decades, they [...]

In this article, we examine the effect of laws prohibiting the hand-held use of a cellphone while driving on the automobile insurance market. Our research is motivated by prior studies that present evidence that the enactment of such laws alters drivers' behaviors in ways that reduce the risk of automobile accidents. We posit that that, by extension, these laws should also lead to reductions in the amount of losses paid by private passenger automobile physical damage insurers. Our analysis indicates that the enactment of a ban on the hand-held use of a cellphone while driving reduces the incurred losses and incurred loss ratios of automobile insurers by approximately 3 percent, suggesting that these bans have important economic consequences not previously documented in the literature. Additional analysis suggests that hand-held cellphone bans eventually lead to incremental reductions in premiums, but we do not observe these reductions in premiums until a couple of years following the enactment of a ban. Our analysis of automobile insurance losses also represents a departure from most prior studies of cellphone bans and therefore contributes to the ongoing debate in the public health literature regarding the extent to which hand-held cellphone bans have implications for traffic safety., Introduction The safety of individuals operating automobiles is a paramount public health concern. Automobile crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States, and each year, millions of [...]

This article links representative enrollee panel data to health plan data on (1) prices, (2) service quality, and (3) nonessential benefits for the German statutory multipayer market and the years 2007-2010. We first show that although heavy federal regulation ensures a simple choice architecture, the majority of health plans are dominated--even when considering four nonprice attributes. Enrollees in dominated plans are older, less educated, and unhealthier. Second, we assess how switchers value prices relative to nonprice health plan attributes. Our mixed logit models incorporate a total of 1,700 health plan choices with each more than 50 choice sets. While prices are an important determinant for nearly everyone, 40 percent of all switchers do not seem to value service quality and supplemental benefits when choosing health plans., Introduction When it comes to regulating health insurance markets, policymakers around the world debate the fundamental question of how much choice would be optimal for consumers. On the one side [...]

Health systems across the country are struggling to maintain their overall profitability and operating margins. Organization leaders realize they must take a hard look at their existing models to maintain [...]

As personal information has become a monetizable asset, risk, compliance and data experts have increasingly been forced to address the regulatory and operational ramifications of the rapid, mass availability of [...]

Best practices are often born out of failure. The deadly Tylenol poisoning spree in 1982, for example, became the model of crisis management. Parent company Johnson & Johnson acted quickly [...]

Intentionally or not, many workers in the United States are classified as independent contractors (IC). In classifying a worker as an IC instead of an employee, putative employers can eliminate [...]

In its Global Risks Report 2018 at the beginning of the year, the World Economic Forum ranked data fraud or theft as the fourth-highest risk in terms of likelihood, citing [...]

THE EUROPEAN UNION'S GENERAL DATA PROTECTION Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018, and despite the publicity and prognoses of doom, it did not have any immediate earth-shattering [...]

Florida homeowners writers seeking rate hikes say a reinsurance market stressed by abusive litigation practices and increased frequency and severity of storms primarily pushed the call for strong double-digit increases. [...]

Risk managers and their insurers spend quite a lot of time identifying risks that could impact their organizations. Many of those risks, such as cyber, have been a significant concern [...]

Best's Underwriting Reports and Best's Loss Control Reports provide insight into the lines of coverage, exposures and loss control for gun manufacturers. Gun manufacturers have lost a legal challenge to [...]

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, employers have faced many challenges. They have had to adapt to major swings in business, adjust to ever-changing regulations and safety protocols, and adopt new [...]

Over the past few years, Arkansas, California, Illinois, New York, Texas and Washington have all enacted legislation that impacts how businesses can use an individual's biometric data. As a result [...]