Applied Underwriters Up For Sale

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has announced it is putting up for sale their Workers Comp specialty insurer, Applied Underwriters. The official story given is that Applied Underwriters competes with other Berkshire Hathaway insurers that sell Workers Compensation insurance.

Hmmm. Yeah. If you say so, Warren. But I have my doubts.

See, Applied Underwriters has sold a ton of policies to small business that could be viewed as less than understandable. Many of the businesses that purchased Applied Underwriters policies have felt that the premium charges sought by Applied were way, way higher than the salesmen had ever indicated they could be.

Our own analysis of some of these complicated policies has found that some of these policies were virtually incomprehensible in terms of explaining how premium charges would ultimately be computed. These policies have generated a number of law suits and some official disapproval from insurance regulators.

So maybe, just maybe, Berkshire Hathaway decided that it would be better if Applied Underwriters became someone else's headache. I could be wrong. But not entirely, I suspect.

First "Shock Audit" Call of 2019

Well, that didn't take long. At 8:46 am, Central time, I received our first "Shock Audit" phone call of 2019, from a small roofing company in New Jersey. The owner has been on the receiving end of a Workers Comp Shock Audit because his insurance company has insisted on placing his payroll into the roofing classification even though, for the time period in question, he was desperately fighting cancer, going through chemo, getting a bone marrow transplant, and quite unable to be going up on roofs. The good news is that treatment was successful and he is no longer enduring the terrible trials involved in fighting that devastating disease. But he is still enduring the trial of an insurance company insisting it is owed large amounts of money that no sane person would agree with.

That's why we call them "Shock Audits"--these tend to strike a business with significant additional premium charges that were not, could not have been, anticipated based on the original policy premium or on the basic facts of the situation. Small businesses tend to be particularly vulnerable to these, although they can strike a business of just about any size. We've helped policyholders ranging from small machine shops on up to an NFL team and Fortune 500 type companies, all of which were subject to Shock Audit charges. I am pretty damn sure we can help this gentleman. We will certainly do our utmost.

Smart Phones and Workers Comp

An old friend, insurance writer Peter Rousmaniere, has just published a fascinating article about the impact of smart phones on auto-related Workers Comp claims. As one might suspect, distracted driving is a problem in this arena, as it is in the non-Workers Comp realm.

At a time when other Workers Comp claims are trending downwards, auto-related claims are going in the other direction, according to NCCI.

You can find this article here.

Illinois Governor Rauner Still Doesn't Understand Workers Comp

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner has used his veto on SB 904, a bill that would have forced insurance companies to pay for authorized medical treatment on a timely basis. Without that new law, insurance companies will be free to continue to delay authorized payment to medical providers for years, exploiting loopholes in existing law.

Some folks have argued that allowing medical providers to file suit in circuit court over unpaid medical bills or claims still awaiting resolution before the Illinois Workers Comp Commission would have introduced additional chaotic complications and litigation into a system already burdened with too much of that.

But I dunno. Seems to me that medical providers who provide authorized medical treatment deserve to be paid on a timely basis. Having worked in the Workers Comp field for forty years, I have to state that I have observed much self-serving delay and obfuscation on the part of insurance companies. Some are better than others, but the problem of years-long delays in paying doctors and hospitals appears to be a significant issue. Insurance companies, in my experience, demand to be paid on a timely basis. And if they aren't, they don't hesitate to run to court. So what's sauce for the goose, as they say...

But the other action Rauner has recently taken was to return to the legislature, with proposed amendments, a bill that would have required insurance companies to obtain prior approval of Workers Compensation insurance rates. Rauner characterized that portion of the bill as messing up Illinois' "competitive" market for Workers Compensation insurance.

Rauner remains focused on doing things to reduce the cost of Workers Compensation claims--which may be laudable in theory, but not so much when it increases the odds of injured workers not getting compensation or proper medical treatment for legitimate injuries, or squeezing medical providers over payments for treating those injured workers.

That 'competitive' market for Workers Comp insurance the governor likes to laud? It only provides benefits to some employers, and to insurance companies, because it pretty much lets insurers charge what they think the market will bear, and the "competition" is a bit of a smoke screen, because the rules over Workers Comp premium charges are very complex, arcane, and can be manipulated by insurance companies to make premiums much larger than anticipated by employers.

Illinois doesn't really have a competitive marketplace for Workers Comp insurance. Illinois has an unregulated marketplace, which is a different thing.

Insurers have so many ways of manipulating Workers Compensation insurance premium charges to make them come out where they want them to that requiring pre-approval of manual rates from the ineffective regulators at the Illinois Department of Insurance would have made no difference to them at all. But even so, insurance companies wanted to make sure they got Rauner to shoot down that token effort at regulation.

That's the sad truth in Illinois and a lot of other states: insurance companies have an effectively de-regulated insurance market for Workers Compensation insurance. And that ain't good news for businesses.

But it sure makes a lot of work for us here at A.I.M.

An Interesting Development Here at A.I.M.

My son and business partner here, Scott M. Priz, graduated from John Marshall Law School, magna cum laude, this past Sunday. Now, he still has to pass the Illinois bar exam, which will take a few months. And then a few months to get the results back.

But by November, A.I.M. should have a full fledged attorney in house, Which may well prove very useful, as the Illinois Department of Insurance increasingly tries to push Workers Comp premium disputes over into legal hearings at the department.

My suspicion is that this development will be a bit of a game-changer in our work. We shall see.

An Alarming News Story From Utah

Sounds as if the folks who work hard to undermine the Workers Comp insurance system that protects workers and employers alike are getting away with their illegal schemes, to a considerable extent. A lot of states have cut their budgets and resources for policing these abuses, but that looks to have been a terrible mistake.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2018/05/18/payroll-fraud-so-rampant-in-utahs-construction-industry-that-legitimate-firms-say-they-are-being-forced-out-of-business/

Another Workers Comp Insurer Ponzi Scheme Collapses

So the final shoe has dropped for the Ponzi scheme that was Guarantee Insurance Company/Patriot Insurance. Insurance regulators finally figured out last year that this operation was, by all reports at least, a scam of the first order.

Anecdotal reports indicate unqualified personnel being hired for important positions and an utter lack of underwriting, along with absurd pricing discounting to shovel in as much premium as possible before the inevitable collapse.

But CEO Steve Mariano got over $15 million transferred directly from Guarantee to himself before the collapse. And now injured workers who were "insured" under policies issued by this outfit are waiting for their medical bills to be paid and their disability checks to arrive.

I remember a day when regulation of Workers Comp insurers was designed to prevent this kind of bullshit. It wasn't always completely successful, of course, but it made things a lot more difficult for the crooks and schemers.