Day: August 26, 2009

Catching on – Mississippi Insurance Chief criticizes State Farm’s 45% coastal rate hike

Chaney, who has convinced some 40 new carriers to do business in the state over the past year and a half, told Insurance Journal that he doesn’t like State Farm’s unwillingness to write new coastal business, its storm deductible or its failure to offer mitigation credits.

How about that, sports fans? Looks like he caught it! (all he missed was State Farm backing off mitigation credits in Florida).  Read on – here’s the story from the Insurance Journal followed by a note to the Commissioner.

State Farm is looking to raise coastal homeowners insurance rates in Mississippi an average 45 percent but the state regulator isn’t very receptive to the idea.

“I am not going to approve the present filing,” Insurance Commissioner Mike Chaney stated flatly, claiming the filing is riddled with “serious issues.”

The proposed increases would be in the coastal counties of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson. Continue reading “Catching on – Mississippi Insurance Chief criticizes State Farm’s 45% coastal rate hike”

Z-Cat’s meow sez hurricane is windstorm and Merlin z-magician pulls memorandum of law from z-hat

Z is for Zurich and the company’s new web site that tells z-truth about the z-weather – a hurricane is a windstorm!  The site also contains an excellent must-read publication, Zurich’s six-page Guide to hurricane emergency action plans.

We talk weather in the south.  Nowadays, weather-talk is usually just polite conversation.  However, for much of our history, ours was a weather-based economy and talking weather was talking money.  Even in that context, no one ever thought of lying about the weather; but, somewhere along the way, something happened that gave birth to one of Sop’s favorite sayings – don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

Policyholder attorney Chip Merlin briefly explained how Sop’s quip applied to post-Katrina litigation in a recent post about Zurich’s new website and admission:

Some insurance company attorneys have been arguing that a “windstorm” is only the “wind” part of a hurricane and not the entire tropical cyclone that has wind, storm surge, and everything else that causes damage from a tropical windstorm. Their clients know better, but it does not prevent defense attorneys from arguing this unsupported bad faith position.

In a follow-up post yesterday, Merlin explains why defining a hurricane as a windstorm is significant and, in the process, also helps me pull together a few thoughts about the unexpected risk of an all-risk policy following Hurricane Katrina:

Randy Santa Cruz, William Weatherly, and I came up with this idea while working in Mississippi following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. I’ve attached a draft memorandum of law so others may use this argument with their own facts and policy language. Let me give you the Reader’s Digest version of this analysis.

The relevant policy language is fairly standard in most homeowner policies. The language regarding “collapse” caused by a “windstorm” is significant Continue reading “Z-Cat’s meow sez hurricane is windstorm and Merlin z-magician pulls memorandum of law from z-hat”