Monday, May 14, 2007

A Complete Exit

In March, inspired by a Galveston County Daily News editorial, I wrote:
The next time an insurance company threatens a partial withdrawal from an Atlantic coastal region, every state on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast should invite the insurance company to make a complete exit. That includes 20 states with coastal counties or parishes, which make up over a third (134 million) of the United States' population (300 million).

That’s a sizable market to lose.
Via Mr. Homan, I see that Allstate will "stop selling new home insurance policies in California and would continue to seek a 12% rate increase for its 900,000 existing customers."

California's population in 2000 was over 33 million. Were California to join the similarly treated Gulf and Atlantic Coast States in asking Allstate to make a complete exit, the insurance company would be locked out of doing business with more than half (167 million) the population of the United States (300 million).

Now *that's* a sizable market to lose.

2 comments:

bayoustjohndavid said...

I saw something in USA Today about Allstate no longer writing new policies in California, but didn't write about it because I haven't had time to look up old articles. I thought I read somewhere that California's auto insurance market was big enough for the state to make the insurance companies behave themselves.

Weird thing is, whenever the subject of health care comes up, people talk about how health care is paid for in the rest of the industrialized world. It's been that way for at least thirty years. Yet I've never once heard anybody discuss how home owner's or catastrophe insurance is handled elsewhere. I know that most industrialized nations have better pension systems, so home ownership might not be as big a part of retirement security, but homeownership rates aren't all that much lower. When I looked it up, it looked like Sweden was the about the only industrialized nation with homeownership rates below 50%. I wasn't real sure about the source I found or that I was reading the table correctly; I tried to find info one night when I couldn't sleep months ago, so i could easily be wrong.

Anonymous said...

Cuba has better health care than the US and over 90% home ownership.

I say the governator tell Allstate: insure all or insure none.