A story out of Pennsylvania has highlighted the ‘betwixt and between’ nature of insurance coverage for private possessions placed in long term storage. The storage facilities that have sprung up like weeds under highway overpasses and along frontage roads are a good indicator that Americans today have significantly more stuff than previous generations. If that is not the case, then more of us lack barns to store it in and have turned to the ‘lock and store’ facilities familiar to all of us.

In Pennsylvania recently, a fire of undetermined origin ignited a 34 unit self storage building and destroyed virtually all of the property stored there. Two interesting facts came to light about the safety of such facilities. The first issue arose because the security conscious owner insisted on its tenants using commercial grade locks. “The locks are pretty standard throughout the industry,” the owner said. “We sold them the locks. You can’t cut through them. That’s why they’re so good, but that’s also why we had so much fire damage. We couldn’t get into the units.”

The other issue that came to bear was insurance coverage. It was understood that the owner of the facility is not responsible for the property loss of his tenants – that issue is spelled out in the rental agreements. The real question for most tenants was whether or not their home owners’ insurance covered the stored property.

“We had someone come in who lost their stuff in the Madison Township fire, and because they had homeowner’s insurance with us, the loss was covered,” said Todd Shoemaker of State Farm Insurance in Dickson City.

While many homeowners’ policies also cover items in storage facilities, some do not, he said. Some owners can offer insurance for tenants’ possessions if they don’t have coverage already in place, he said. In this case, the owner did not provide insurance. If you’re using a storage facility, check your homeowners’ policy on coverage and if it’s not there already, it would be a prudent investment.

Disability insurance has been an industry staple for decades. In recent years however, disability insurance has been stagnant after industry losses drove out many providers. With the advent of new product concepts, today sales are on the rise, driven by more-affordable policies, as well as a growing number of employers making disability insurance available for workers to purchase at a discount.

Similar to “consumer driven” health insurance, a simpler and cheaper type of disability policy called “guaranteed renewable” is becoming increasingly popular. According to Limra International, an industry research group, sales of new policies increased 8 percent last year, according to Limra International, an insurance-industry research group.

Guaranteed renewable coverage provides less of a safety net than older-style “non-cancelable” policies that lock in premiums for the life of the policy. The rates on guaranteed-renewable insurance can go up each year; despite that face it is substantially cheaper than non-cancelable coverage.

Prices and benefits range widely according to age, the amount of income being replaced and a host of other variables. The average monthly benefit for non-cancelable individual disability insurance is $4,242, for an average annual premium of $1,684, among companies reporting to Limra. The average monthly benefit for guaranteed renewable is $1,479, for an annual premium of $523.

Fewer employers are paying for group coverage in their employee-benefit packages, in a bid to cut labor costs. But the newer products are allowing employers to return to disability insurance as a benefit offering. Recent converts such as Staples Inc. are finding that guaranteed renewable policies can be provided at a reasonable rate, and still cost the employee at least 20% less than privately acquired disability coverage would cost.

As in many states, in Illinois the debate over the cost of medical malpractice often puts insurance companies and trial lawyers at bitter odds.

In an unusual bid to challenge the status quo, former president of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association Kim Presbrey has started an insurance company promising doctors more choice and better deals on expensive malpractice coverage.

He’s pumping a lot of work into challenging the state’s major medical insurance company, a doctor-owned business that has more than 65 percent of the malpractice market. “We expect to make money,” Presbrey said. “To the extent that we are able to decrease their premiums at some level, I think we’ll save everybody money.”

That was the goal last year when state officials approved changes in the law meant to encourage more competition for malpractice insurance. Some doctors were fleeing the state or retiring because of steeply rising insurance premiums – some of which had more than tripled. Doctors and insurers blamed the rate increases on out-of-control lawsuit awards, while trial lawyers and victim advocates condemned insurance mismanagement.

In response, legislators approved some limits on lawsuit awards but also strengthened state oversight of doctors and insurers. The major insurer, ISMIE Mutual Insurance Co., was forced to promote competition by opening its ratemaking formulas to other companies.

Presbrey, an Aurora-based attorney, says the notion of getting into the insurance business came to him while researching claims that Illinois faced a malpractice “crisis.” Further research and ISMIE’s data made it clear the market was lucrative market, he said.

Presbrey hopes to collect between $10 million and $20 million in premiums the first year. By comparison, ISMIE collects more than $400 million in premiums each year.

With corporations creating on-site health clinics in an attempt to stem rising costs in health care for their employees and themselves, a new niche is developing: on-site health clinic staff providers.

CHD Meridian in Pennsylvania is one such company. Their client-base includes more than 100 corporations, and they run more than 200 health clinics. Dixon Thayer is the CEO of CHD Meridian. Some clinics are staffed by nurse practitioners; others have family physicians. He says they can even provide minor dental care, even basic surgeries like stitches.

“We’re not there to replace the hospitals. We’re not there to replace the specialists. We’re actually there to help the employee get the best care they can,” says Thayer.

Larger corporations with more than 1000 employees can expect to save a great deal. Smaller corporations who invest in conjunction with other small businesses in the same office park or area could reap the benefits as well.

Cigna, the health insurance company, has an on-site health clinic and they saved more than $1.4 million in employee work time alone. With savings like that available, the new niche in health care provided by on-site clinic staffers like CHD Meridian are more and more in demand.

In the late ’80s Al Rohling, Alabama’s director of the state housing authority, watched many parents living in the housing he controlled quitting their jobs when their kids got sick, thereby lowering their incomes to qualify for government medical help.

Rohling came to the conclusion that if a child’s illness could drive a family into poverty, perhaps medical insurance would contribute to the restoration of family financial help as well. “Health care for children really is a bridge to get out of poverty,” says Rohling today.

Rohling quit his job in 1988 to help set up the Child Caring Foundation, which provides free health insurance for children through the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama health care provider. The foundation is just one example of a charity that bridges the gap between Medicaid – subsidized insurance – for the poorest and private health insurance paid for either privately for those who can afford it, or by an employer.

Children with health insurance are usually taken to the doctor at the first sign of illness, while parents of uninsured kids often wait because they are conscious of the cost.

Then the child’s illness can worsen and the parent is forced to miss work to nurse the child back to health.

In Alabama, there were 230,000 uninsured children in 1988, and that has fallen to around 70,000 due to a combination of the Child Caring Foundation and state programs. Some 90 percent of the children on the program move into private health insurance within about 30 months. To recruit families, Rohling tours the state presenting health screenings at schools with the help of volunteers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing and elsewhere.

St. Paul Travelers Insurance said in December that it will stop renewing many commercial insurance policies in the New Orleans area in 2007, stoking fears that other insurers are prepared to pull out of the market after Hurricane Katrina.

The state’s largest commercial insurer will stop renewing property business policies for an undisclosed number of small- and mid-sized businesses, mostly in Orleans Parish, starting in March. It wasn’t immediately clear how many businesses would be affected, but The St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc. writes about 14 percent of the state’s policies.

The company is the first insurer to announce that it will stop renewing commercial policies in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, which destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Mississippi and Louisiana, according to the state’s insurance department.

“St. Paul Travelers has a high concentration of insured commercial property in hurricane-prone areas in the state. We are reducing our exposure in some of those areas, by non-renewing a number of small- to mid-sized commercial properties,” said a Travelers spokesman.

The homeowners’ insurance crisis that has swept over the Gulf states and the Mid-Atlantic coastal areas has unfailingly been blamed on a fundamental shift in weather patterns. The insurance companies have made it clear that their old models for predicting catastrophes are no longer viable. What is interesting about Travelers decision, then, is the different set of facts that drove their decision. They are citing the state of the rebuilding of the city’s levee system as the primary reason for their decision.

It’s one thing to fault global warming for hurricane damage. That’s a planet-wide problem that is the result of human consumption and industrialization. The problem in New Orleans is the result of decades of incompetence from municipal leadership: incompetence that was a principal factor in the city’s destruction.

Liability on the job has become an interesting wrinkle in this nation of increasing cultural and lingual diversity. Professional translators have become the focus of the latest legal risk management ploy. A translator takes a job for $100, the client claims a translation error cost him $100,000 and sues. This is the nightmarish scenario that’s being used to sell liability insurance, (a.k.a. Errors & Omissions (E&O) insurance), to translators. In fact, according to the American Translators Association there is no record of a translator ever having been sued, let alone successfully sued, for translation errors in the U.S.

Despite this lack of precedent, some translation buyers now require that translators carry liability insurance. Some translators feel that this may be an attempt to shift the responsibility for translation quality from themselves to the translator.

The Association notes that there hasn’t been a single lawsuit for E&O against translators in the U.S., the country known for often frivolous lawsuits. They attribute this to at least the possibility that translation buyers don’t consider translators wealthy enough to be sued. This latter reason would of course disappear if E&O insurance became widespread.

According to some, translation is protected under the First Amendment right to free speech, but, as with other legal precepts on the question, has never been tested in court.

The question for translators then is this: is liability insurance an indispensable protection, an addition to the cost of doing business without any tangible benefit, or dangerous bait which by its very existence could encourage lawsuits against translators?

The Blue Hills Ski Area in suburban Boston has shut down indefinitely while the private operator of the state-owned facility scrambles to find new liability insurance coverage.

The ski area hopes to have coverage in a matter of days, but there are no guarantees according to a spokesman for Ragged Mountain Resort, the company that operates Blue Hills. “We are not giving up, we have not lost hope, we just need coverage-right now we are expecting a call anytime from our insurer to say ‘Okay, we will write this.”

A lawsuit by an injured skier required the ski area’s former insurer to put aside $200,000 to meet a possible claim, Pins said. With that claim pending, a new insurer took over the ski area’s policy and opted not to renew the liability insurance. Why a ski resort operator would sign a new policy with a company that excluded liability coverage is a question that remains unanswered.

The state will not allow the ski area to operate without coverage – a sensible policy for public facilities or private. Meanwhile, the closure of the facility in Canton a few miles south of Boston has left high school ski teams that use the Blue Hills slopes for practices and races in the lurch.

In these days of creative home financing and sky high housing costs, one of the additions to the home-buying landscape is personal mortgage insurance (PMI). This coverage is paid by the homeowner on behalf of the lender – it’s an insurance policy that protects the lender should the borrower go into default and the home go into foreclosure.

The lending institutions of this country decided some time ago that anyone who could not make a 20 percent down payment on a home purchase – the traditional mortgage model for past decades – would be required to include PMI in their home financing package. This insurance isn’t cheap – it can be up to one percent of the loan amount, per year. For this reason, many people go through the hoop of obtaining a second, piggy back loan that allows them to plunk down the 20 percent down payment and keep the primary lender happy. Of course, then the new homeowner is paying on not one, but two loans.

The price of homes these days precludes most people from coming up with a twenty percent cash down payment. The use of secondary loans allowed the homeowner to take the tax deduction for the interest on both loans, allowing a little financial relief from the added burden of the insurance.

Just weeks ago at the behest of the insurance industry, Congress made PMI payments tax deductible as well. Now the insurance companies will not be losing business to dual loan home purchases and the lenders will continue to have their borrowers provide insurance for them.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has allowed lawsuits to proceed that ask the state’s four nonprofit Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurers to use some of their cash surpluses to lower health-insurance premiums. The Supreme Court acted last week on a five-year-old lawsuit against Philadelphia-based Independence Blue Cross, saying that a lower court must decide that suit and three others like it on the basis of whether the size of the surpluses violate state nonprofit law.

The lower Commonwealth Court had dismissed the suit against Independence Blue Cross in 2002 after it agreed with the insurer’s argument that the size of its surplus is the domain of state insurance regulators, not nonprofit law. The lawsuits allege that “health-insurance premiums have skyrocketed while the Blues irresponsibly amassed surpluses far larger than required by the state..”

Based on financial reports at the end of 2005, the four Blues insurers had combined surpluses of $5 billion, a sum of money that they say is necessary to ensure their solvency in an emergency. They also say they invest the surpluses and use the income to blunt rate increases. In 2000, the insurers had combined surpluses of just over $3 billion.