Right Street

Consumer Watchdog Should Want a More Dynamic, Competitive Market for California Insureds

Yesterday, I published a paper about, and titled, “The troublesome legacy of Prop 103.” Shortly thereafter, an organization called Consumer Watchdog published a startlingly quick response. The speed of their response, while impressive, is no surprise. Consumer Watchdog owes its …

Don’t Strangle the Cyber-Insurance Market in its Cradle

We live in an era of disruption. Technology redefines our world on a regular basis, as the wonders of networks that allow data to be transferred virtually without restriction have enmeshed knowledge and commerce into our lives on an uninterrupted …

‘Jersey Smart’ Is Better than ‘Jersey Strong’

Earlier this week, I covered South Carolina’s “1,000-year storm,” questioning whether we can actually say with any kind of certainty that such events are, in fact, all that rare. But South Carolina wasn’t the only state affected by the passage …

A ‘1,000-Year Flood’ Almost Certainly Isn’t

Over the weekend, the nation saw the horrific toll of massive flooding across South Carolina, which has left at least nine dead. The Charleston area got nearly a dozen inches of rain on Saturday, while some parts of the state …

California Supreme Court and the Coming Assignment-of-Benefits Gold Rush

The California Supreme Court recently decided to break with its own precedent and declare that insurers can’t stop policyholders from assigning the benefits of their policies before a claim is settled. Like many developments in the world of insurance law, …

Courts Need a Better Appreciation of the Principles of Depreciation

Post-World War II, the United States experienced a simultaneous boom of babies and buildings. To keep pace with the need for new development, homes literally could be ordered out of a Sears catalogue. The true expense of such homes was …

Florida Insurance Chief Calls on NFIP to Hand Over Its Data

In his ongoing efforts to foster a competitive private flood insurance market in Florida, state Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, recently requested help from the state’s Office of Insurance Regulation to obtain data from the federal government that justify the …

California Earthquake Authority Prepares to Go into ‘Hyperspace’

The California Earthquake Authority – the state’s quasi-public earthquake insurance pool – long has had a problem with take-up. Only about 10 percent of homeowners in this most seismically active state actually buy coverage for the biggest catastrophic peril they …

Fracking Drives NAIC Earthquake Conversation

Hydraulic fracturing – the process of extracting oil and gas resources that requires breaking rock through the high-pressured injection of liquid into the ground, popularly known as “fracking” – has caused an uptick in the number of earthquakes that are …

It’s Time for Dialogue, not Demagoguery, on Price Optimization

Social activist Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” was written as a how-to guide for community activists looking to compel political change. Yet its rules are no less applicable to parties already in power, particularly …

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