Insurance is provided to the public by three major sources:
In property and casualty insurance, “service providers” generally refer to organizations that deliver or administer risk-management and loss-adjustment services rather than issuing policies. Examples include claim-adjusting firms, inspection bureaus, and rating organizations such as ISO (Insurance Services Office), which support insurers by providing data, forms, and statistical services.
The federal government offers several property and casualty programs designed to insure against catastrophic or uninsurable risks, such as National Flood Insurance (NFIP), Federal Crop Insurance, and Terrorism Risk Insurance (TRIA).
At the state level, governments are involved in providing unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance, as well as residual market or “shared market” mechanisms like Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plans and Joint Underwriting Associations (JUAs) that ensure property coverage availability when private markets will not insure high-risk applicants.
These public programs serve as safety nets for specific classes of risk or individuals who cannot obtain coverage in the voluntary market.
Private insurers may be organized as stock companies, mutual companies, reciprocal insurers, or fraternal organizations. An insurance company intending to do business in any given state must be authorized by the director/commissioner of insurance. If the director is satisfied that the insurer meets that state’s standards of financial strength, and that allowing them the opportunity to sell insurance in the state doesn’t jeopardize the public interest, they will be granted a certificate of authority and will be referred to as admitted or authorized.
Companies that are structured in a traditional corporate manner are called stock companies. These companies are owned by stockholders who may or may not be policy owners. Profits made by a stock company are passed on to the stockholders in the form of stock dividends. Most property and casualty insurers today are organized as stock companies.
A mutual insurance company is owned by its policy owners. It is structured as a corporation, with the exception that ownership in the company is evidenced through ownership of a policy, not a stock certificate. Earnings from a mutual company’s operations are passed on to the policy owners in the form of policy dividends.
Mutual companies distribute policy dividends through participating policies. This term reflects the fact that policy owners participate in the earnings of the company. Stock companies generally issue only non-participating policies, meaning that policy owners do not share in company profits. Mutual companies operate on a not-for-profit basis for the benefit of policyholders, though they are not legally classified as nonprofit entities under tax law.
Through individual indemnity agreements, certain groups of people provide insurance for one another. Each insured of the reciprocal is called a subscriber. Each subscriber is allocated a separate account where his/her premiums are paid and interest earned is tracked. If any subscriber suffers a loss covered by the reciprocal insurance, each subscriber’s account would be charged a proportional amount based on the subscriber’s premium or exposure to pay the claim. The party who acts as principal of a reciprocal insurance company is known as an attorney-in-fact.
Fraternal benefit societies primarily operate in the life and health sector and are rarely involved in P&C insurance. For property and casualty purposes, this category can instead include certain nonprofit mutual aid groups or cooperatives that insure members for specific risks (for example, church property or agricultural co-ops).
Lloyd’s of London is not an insurance company, but is similar to a stock exchange. Just as an exchange provides facilities for its members but does not buy or sell securities itself, Lloyd’s provides a meeting place to its members who actually transact the business of insurance. Members may be individuals or corporations and are grouped into syndicates, but they remain individually liable and responsible for the contracts of insurance they enter into.
For some risks, the only market may be with specialty carriers. Excess and Surplus Lines is the name given to insurance for which there is no market or insurance available through authorized carriers in the state where the risk arises or is located.
Reinsurance is a contract between insurers that exists when one insurer (the reinsurer) agrees to accept a portion of a risk covered by another insurer (typically a smaller company). The ceding company is responsible for any coverage it has written, but will have a legitimate claim against the reinsurer for any portion of its loss that is reinsured.
A quota share agreement involves a ceding insurer agreeing to pay a reinsurer a specific percentage (i.e. 30%) of the premium collected if the reinsurer agrees to pay the same percentage of any loss that occurs.
An excess loss agreement involves the reinsurer agreeing to pay only when a loss exceeds a specific amount.
Another method of categorizing private insurers that disregards whether they are a stock, mutual, reciprocal, or fraternal organization relates to the regulation of insurers. To better understand this concept, it is important to know that the insurance industry is regulated primarily at the state level (not federal) and insurers can be categorized by their state of domicile.
After the South-Eastern Underwriters Decision established that insurance transacted across state lines was interstate commerce, the McCarran-Ferguson Act was drafted to give the federal government the right to regulate insurance, but only to the extent that the state does not.
Insurance is provided to the public through 3 main sources: Service Providers, Government, and Private Commercial Insurers.
Private insurers are further divided into different types:
Other types of private insurers include Lloyd’s of London (not an insurance company but a market for insurance transactions), Excess and Surplus Lines (specialty carriers for unique risks), and reinsurers (accept a portion of risk from other insurers).
Sign up for free to take 21 quiz questions on this topic