Continuing the trend toward Federal involvement in Insurance issues, the Government Accountability Office ("GAO") was asked by several U.S. Senate and U.S. House Members to prepare a report on what would be involved for private insurance companies to take on the additional risks of Flood Insurance. (Private insurance companies avoid Flood risks; actually, private insurance companies refuse to cover them. That is why the National Flood Insurance Program was enacted.)
The GAO reported back that private insurance companies still do not want to wade into Floods, so to speak. In general, if private insurance companies were going to take on risks in addition to those which they already cover, then private insurance companies would of course have to evaluate those risks, the GAO reported. Here is the GAO report: "Flood Insurance / Strategies for Increasing Private Sector Involvement" (released under date of January, 2014).
At the same time as the GAO released the report, private insurance companies announced that they are establishing their own computer modeling platforms for evaluating catastrophic risks including Hurricanes and other 'weather events' which cause catastrophic damage including from floods. Charles E. Boyle, "21 Insurers, Brokers Launch Oasis 'Open Source' Cat Model," posted online in "Carrier Managment", January 29, 2014. Parenthetically, "Carrier Management" is a relatively new newsletter which apparently belongs to the same publishing group as the more widely known "Insurance Journal" and "Claims Journal" publications.
© 2014 by Dennis J. Wall. All rights reserved. No claim to original U.S. Government works.
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