Declarations

Good drivers
“It neither affirms the status quo nor jumps headlong or without controls into the Wild West of competition. The idea is to advantage good drivers and make sure we are not harming good drivers wherever they are.”

— Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick commenting on his insurance commissioner’s plan to introduce “managed competition” into the heavily-regulated Massachusetts private passenger auto insurance market.

Spitzer damage
“Certainly for Spitzer it’s politically damaging. When you come in on the winds of reform, anything that feels like old school politics works against you. If he wanted to be cleaning out Albany, the last thing he wanted to do was to be starting with his own senior staff.”

— Lee Miringoff of Marist College on the political fallout after a report said two of N.Y. Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s top aides were involved in a plot to smear the governor’s political nemesis, Republican Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. Spitzer said he had been unaware of the operation, suspended one of the aides and reassigned the other, and apologized to Bruno and the public.

Federal wind
“Including wind coverage within the National Flood Insurance Program will create artificial subsidies, thereby essentially raising rates for consumers in inland parts of the country who are not subject to the same kind of wind-damage risks faced by policyholders on the coast. It is hard to believe that Congress wants to give more responsibility to a failed government program. I wouldn’t invest in a company that had inadequate cash flow and $17.5 billion of debt.”

— Ben McKay, Property Casualty Insurers of America, opposing a House panel’s decision to add wind coverage to the federal flood insurance program.

NBCR coverage concerns
“NBCR (nuclear, biological, chemical, radioactive) raises far more concerns than does coverage for conventional terrorist attacks, ones that NAMIC continues to believe would be best considered through the creation of a commission to study the implications of an attack using NBCR weapons and the specifics of how best the nation can address the massive harm that such an attack would cause.”

— Carl Parks, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, on one provision in the latest federal terrorism reinsurance act renewal.

Workers’ comp losses
“The workers’ compensation line of insurance has seen a steady decrease in frequency over the past 10 years, but total incurred losses are climbing and continue to be driven by severity. While a focus on severity factors such as the cost of medical services, utilization rates, back-to-work, state-specific strategies, and claims management can help to control the overall severity of loss, the ‘missing link’ may be attention to injury prevention.”

— Mark Jablonowski, an analyst at Conning and author of the Conning Research study, “Workers’ Compensation: Getting a Handle on Severity.”