A View From The Press Box

Sen. Hillary Clinton, increasingly desperate to overtake Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, ripped into her opponent today for failing to support universal pet health insurance should he reach the White House.

Just two weeks ago, I pooh-poohed the idea of getting an optional federal charter approved anytime soon as “probably a pipe dream.” So, how do I feel now in the wake of the shocking endorsement of an OFC today by the Treasury Department as part of a comprehensive financial services regulatory overhaul? Read on to find out, and feel free to weigh in on this startling development.

I thought I had long since heard the last of "The Insurance Hoax," a pure hatchet job in the September 2007 issue of "Bloomberg Markets" that indicted the entire insurance industry for its claims-handling practices. But much to my astonishment, the skewed diatribe has been chosen as a finalist for a prestigious journalism award. Stop the presses!

While attending the IIABA's annual conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday, I saw one sign of Sen. Barack Obama's amazing popularity in the hyper-competitive bobblehead doll market.

Here I am, pictured at the recent Big I conference with Eddie--short for "Ease Of Doing Business Man," the mascot of the Real Time campaign, designed to convince agents to upgrade their tech capabilities. I like Eddie. I smile when I see his cartoon image as part of the campaign's logo, and it was fun to pose with a "live" version in the exhibit area. It made me think about how effective such techniques are when trying to brand your product, service or profession.

One of the most important and interesting developments at the recent NAIC meeting came in under the radar and took most insurers by surprise--a controversial call to force homeowners carriers to collect and disclose data on the race, gender and income bracket of their prospects and clients. In responding, insurers are damned if they do and damned if they don't support the proposal.

My blog traffic soared last month to all-time record levels of 18,237 unique visitors and 85,842 page views, fueled no doubt by multiple commentaries on the Spitzer scandal. People also stick around once they come to this site--with an average visit duration of nearly 20 minutes. I just wanted to thank you all again for your loyal readership and lively feedback! Keep those visits and posts coming, and tell your colleagues and friends in the business to join us at www.property-casualty.com!

The other day, I blogged about calls for insurers to collect and disclose information on the personal characteristics of their clients and prospects, but that wasn't the only controversial data demand issued at the recent NAIC meeting. Indeed, the heat was also placed on carriers to document their climate change exposures. Is this just a lot of hot air by critics on a fishing expedition, or is this a serious search for the truth about how secure the industry is when it comes to global warming?

Here we are, two weeks before the RIMS conference, and already I've been inundated with phone calls, e-mails, faxes, snail-mails, carrier pigeons, skywriting and singing telegrams from just about every exhibitor, asking me to please meet with one of their key people. The fact that there is only one of me and hundreds of you means face time is more valuable than a barrel of oil these days! Yet few PR people seem to have a clue how to get a busy editor's attention.

As a safety net, insurance not only provides coverage when routine losses occur, but for bizarre and pretty funny exposures, too! That fact was vividly confirmed when we asked readers for their strangest claims stories the past two years (click here and here for those stories). We're doing another roundup for our May 26 edition, and once again I urge you to share tales about your most difficult and unusual claims. Contact Associate Editor Phil Gusman at pgusman@nuco.com before May 1 with your best war stories, and feel free to post them here as well.

Have property insurers become too dependent on computerized catastrophe models, and if so, what is the alternative, given the potentially huge exposures they face? Those were some of the provocative questions raised yesterday by one of the pioneers of cat modeling, Karen Clark.

Now that a key member of Congress has introduced a bill creating an interim Office of Insurance Information, does that make an optional federal charter inevitable? Not as long as the industry itself remains so bitterly divided over the issue.

Back on April 9, I blogged about the controversial suggestion by Greg Squires, a sociology professor at George Washington University, to require insurance carriers to collect and disclose data on the race and income of prospects and clients, to prove once and for all whether there is any prejudice--active or not--when pricing homeowners coverage. I said I didn't think it was a bad idea, but many in the industry strongly disagree. I promised to give Greg an opportunity to explain his views, so here goes. Click on to read more about his position, and feel free to respond.

Despite having two strong, intelligent, history-making candidates, are the Democrats on a collision course that will leave the Republicans in control of the White House come November? That worst-case scenario (for Democrats, at least) is far more likely to play out the longer Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama keep hammering away at one another while Sen. John McCain waits to face the bruised and battered "winner."

In her article in the April 20 edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Rebecca Mowbray posed a stark question: "In dealing with all the insurance problems that arose with Hurricane Katrina, would it have made a difference for Louisiana homeowners if a federal insurance regulator in Washington was calling the shots rather than a state insurance commissioner in Louisiana?" What do you think?

As I arrived today at this year's RIMS conference in San Diego, my thoughts drifted back to the first time I attended this convention of corporate insurance buyers in the late 1980s, when risk managers had a fairly thankless job. Man, how times have changed, as NU's exclusive coverage of the annual "Risk Management Compensation Survey" by Logic Associates reveals.

I would be the last person to suggest that the media, of which I am a proud member, can or even should be "managed." But the fact is that demands for information by journalists at a time of crisis (and even during routine periods) present a reputational exposure that risk managers can (and should) help their organizations more effectively prepare for. That was the central message delivered by a press panel I moderated today at the RIMS conference in San Diego.

The biggest buzz at the RIMS conference here in San Diego this week was about the threats and opportunities prompted by climate change. Zurich, Aon and other major players touted ambitious environmental initiatives. The chairman of Lloyd's, Lord Peter Levene, even took a side trip to Sacramento to meet with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to talk about the impact of global warming. Is this all a lot of hot air, or a long overdue response to the most serious threat our planet faces?

Would federal regulation better protect big commercial buyers? The Risk and Insurance Management Society's leadership is excited about the recent endorsement by the Bush administration of an optional federal charter. But all I can say is, be careful what you wish for, because federal oversight certainly has not produced good risk management under this hands-off White House, and I doubt any cost efficiencies will be passed along to consumers.