There’s a school of thought that says, “the number don’t lie”. The assumption is that numbers are facts and facts are always true. So if someone counts the number of times something happens, this gives you a basis from which to estimate the probability of the same thing happening across a population. This is the basis of underwriting for insurance purposes. Teams of highly trained people called actuaries count how many traffic accidents there are. They break it down into the age, make and model of car, the age, gender and profession of the driver, the time of day, the weather conditions, and so on. We happily accept information that, in the first half of 2009, only 16,626 people were killed in crashes, a 7% drop as against the same period last year. We are not surprised when we read this proves that there are 1.15 deaths per 100 million miles driven. The facts are facts and must be true.
Except when we apply the same approach to health insurance, some people get upset. Perhaps it’s appropriate to be writing this at Halloween but the same actuaries have been counting the number of people who die from various diseases. For the purposes of this article, one of the main areas of interest has been the question of obesity. There are detailed numbers available across the country showing that people who have a high Body Mass Index (BMI) are more likely than thin people to die of heart disease. The medical evidence proves what are called “comorbidities”, i.e. the presence of two or more conditions which, more often than not, suggests a cause and effect at work, or that there’s an underlying vulnerability to both conditions. We are not so unhappy to accept a link between drug abuse and mental illness, but mention a possible link between body weight and disease and, suddenly, people are upset. People do not want to hear a link between their lifestyles and the probability of early death.
The reality is that adults with a BMI of 30 and above are either being turned down for health insurance or charged a higher premium. No matter how politically correct it may be to talk about obesity, insurance companies protect themselves by classifying obesity as a pre-existing condition justifying refusal or a premium loading. So welcome to baby Alex, a newcomer to Grand Junction. He’s four months old and breast-feeding. He’s a happy, bouncing baby weighing in at seventeen pounds. With a length of 25 inches, this puts him in the 99th percentile for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s height and weight charts for babies of the same age. So the health insurance company refused coverage. Their cut-off point is the 95 percentile. When you think about it, this is a dramatic piece of news. It seems you are never too young to be overweight. This is not something to be dealt with through an increase in health insurance rates. This is a blank refusal of coverage. At four months, the actuaries have already decided this baby is too big a risk to insure. The parents are naturally upset. Even though their pediatrician has no health concerns, they are talking about putting the baby on the Atkins diet. They may joke but this may be a real sign of change in the health insurance industry. There is no sentimentality here. After all, the numbers don’t lie, except the insurers changed their mind when the publicity hit. Alex is now insured. Some good news to end on.
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Life is never fair. Just when you think you have hit rock bottom and things cannot get any worse, they get worse. You would have thought that a recession would mean premium rates would stay the same. In your dreams, you might have hoped for the rates to fall. After all, there’s massive unemployment – it’s the worst level of unemployment for more than sixty years. With household incomes falling and no job security, this is not the time to find premium rates increasing. Yet when those premium notices drop into your mail boxes, the evidence is there. And it’s not just you. Premiums are going up for most drivers. This is so unfair! All but three states in the union have mandatory liability insurance. For everyone who wants to stay legal on the roads, the price of driving is getting to deterrent levels. First it was the price of gas shooting up like a rocket. Now it’s those premiums! What’s going on?
There are two quite different problems coming together at the same time. One comes from the general downturn in the economy. The other is connected with the system of regulation for the insurance industry. On paper, the companies have an easy ride. They collect in the premiums, receive the claims, pay out on the claims and keep the balance as profit. Except the worst recession in decades caught them off guard. It all comes down to what insurers should do with the money they have collected in. Their answer was to invest most of it in the stock market. That way, they earned dividends and got capital growth until it was needed to pay out on the claims. But some invested in these new securitized bonds based on mortgages and other loans. So, when both the property and the capital markets were hit, insurers found themselves with big losses. Under normal circumstances, this would not have been a problem, but the insurance industry has to play by different rules. They are regulated by the insurance departments and commissioners for each state. To protect all you people who buy policies, the key rule is that the companies must have enough capital in reserve to pay out on the claims you make. When the stock and bond markets collapsed, many companies either broke the rule or were too close for comfort. So companies have been moving cash around between states to keep themselves legal and putting up the premiums to collect more.
It’s ironic that a rule designed to protect consumers should be pushing up the premiums so fast. Who would have thought the auto insurance industry would lose so much of the money they had invested. After all, they employ all these clever people called actuaries to measure the risks for writing policies. You would think they would have seen the risks of some of the investments they were making. Yet, like most of the other investment managers, the insurers were taken by surprise. The result is that, overnight, many were close to not having enough money to pay out on your policies. That was and remains a serious problem. That’s why the auto insurance industry is asking you all for more money.
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We all know that there’s a war between sexes on who are better drivers, men or women? And as men are claiming to be far better at the wheel the statistics are actually on the opposite side. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Report dated 2004 notes men being involved in 27,000 more fatal accidents, 432,000 more injury accidents and 1,369,000 more incidents with damaged property, resulting in total 1,828,000 more insurance claims filed by men in 2004 only. And since then the trend hasn’t changed.
And it’s hard to tell that the most risky drivers – men younger than 25 years old – are contributing to these statistics. These are actually men of all age groups.
As an insurance agent from Ohio, Brad Vermillion has stated: “Men are more aggressive in their very nature and pursue a riskier attitude when driving a car. You see a man not wearing a seat belt, speeding and driving under influence far more often than a woman. The amount of miles driven throughout the lifetime is also quite higher with men than with women, which of course means a greater risk of being involved in a traffic accident and filing an insurance claim. The less you drive the safer you are.”
A righteous question rises consequently, whether do insurance companies take into account the statistics provided by the NHTSA and other organizations? “Insurers know about such statistics very well and they are reflected in their pricing guidelines,” stated Vermillion. “A man will always pay a higher auto insurance premium than a woman, even if he lives in a safe area and has a perfect driving and credit record.”
But the overall trend has started to shift in recent years, making the gap between men and women smaller in what concerns auto insurance premiums. “The last couple of years have shown more and more women driving at longer distances and for more extended periods of time. This results from a wider access to cars among women and more intense and active lifestyle attitudes, forcing women to move around a lot more than in previous years,” states Dave Roush, CEO of Insurance.com. “Women spend more time behind the wheel and raise the stress levels, which inevitably results in more aggressive attitude from women on the road. This trend is only starting to take shape and it’s a matter of time to judge whether it will minimize the gap between men and women in what concerns auto insurance rates. But for now men are well ahead in this competition.”
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