Industry Insights

I went home from my office at 501 Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, PA, around noon on March 18, 2020, after making sure one of our new employees had the computer equipment she needed to work from home. During my commute, I listened to a President Trump news conference on CNBC radio discussing the Coronavirus. At the time, I thought we would be home for six to eight weeks, and then we would be back in the office and things would return to normal. Well, a lot has happened since then.

I have a confession to make. As I watched the Coronavirus pandemic spread throughout the world and into the United States in late January and February, I was openly derisive about the potential impacts. I was convinced this would just be another flu (don’t we have one of those already), and this would not likely be a significant concern, both from a risk/loss perspective and from a societal impact standpoint. It’s a good thing I learned an important lesson a long time ago: be humble in defeat. 

At HM Insurance Group (HM), we’re very proud of our financial strength. Our Stop Loss paper is rated “A” by A.M. Best, and we have a combined surplus of more than $1,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes. This capital is the financial bedrock of the promise we make to employer groups – we will pay their claims. The Stop Loss market has changed a lot in the past ten years. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, we issued limited policies, meaning they had annual or lifetime policy maximums of $1,000,000 or $2,000,000. As an underwriter at that time, it was hard to envision claims reaching those policy limits. But now it’s something that happens with frequency.

Most people in insurance are familiar with Lloyd’s of London, which started in 1686 in London, England, at Lloyd’s Coffee House, a venue popular with sailors, merchants and ship owners. Lloyd’s originally provided shipping news, but it became an ideal place to obtain marine insurance for ship owners interested in pooling their losses so the impact of losing one ship would be spread across the entire group.

This morning as I drove in to work, it was 46 degrees on the thermometer, and this was really the first day that, to me, felt like fall had arrived. As underwriters, we’re currently experiencing a fifth season in the year. It’s called renewal season, and it comes a little earlier every year. This year, it started in late July and will go through New Year’s Eve.