MKR, first of all, I kid around a lot and the longer you read the drivel I write you will understand. Secondly, we were ALL high risk at that age. Heck I rolled my car at age 16 with the Chief of Police behind me...thankfully I went over 50 years thereafter without an accident. You can read all about it...
Lastly, we are all having fun here. This is not Unfriendly Politics. We meet for coffee each morning and some of us drink it all day...
Casualty Property insurance companies went through a competitive phase, and it would not surprise me if it kept repeating itself, where companies want to increase market share, they lower rates, the loss ratios go up (no surprise) and then they wildly overreacted with huge price swings and cancellations. They made me feel bad about myself as an agent; I was abusing my neighbors by handing them bills that were ridiculous and they trusted me. So I left the industry and concentrated on the life and financial services part, plus a long stretch in the title insurance back office business. So I hear you MKR, yes it was about the money; the problem was the industry didn't know how to manage itself and really jerked around its clientele. Ask any small business owner back then with a gas station or contracting business or worse a roofer or tree surgeon. They were loved one year and thrown out the next and it had nothing to do with their losses.
I have been an independent insurance agent for many years and worked all sides of the street, including spending a year teaching every insurance policy word for word to trainees in a corporate training environment. Every word...so I have lived and breathed this stuff all my life, seen what the three piece suits in Hartford CT would do with a wave of a new regulation to create havoc out in the market place. Insurance companies know how to say no very well, they do a poor job of saying yes and frankly meaning it.
And after looking at auto applications for over six years in Washington DC/suburban VA/MD in the 70's, I quickly learned that folks just do not tell the truth. You learn to be a bit cynical as an underwriter because those who gamed the system learned early on talking about all those tickets put one in the Assigned Risk or the most expensive policy.
so folks conveniently forgot those tickets and it was up to me how to pass judgment. And I tried to be fair. Really was like a doctor assessing health risk; i.e. how many risk factors do you have? Risk is normal; it's how much that is the issue. And no driver thinks they are a bad driver...
And when I looked at my friend the police chief and asked him if he thought my car could be fixed, after sliding upside down on the pavement for about 150 feet, he looked at me, shook his head, groaned, and was probably trying to figure out how to explain this to my father, who was head of the school board and very involved in town. My brothers and I never got into trouble so this was pretty unusual. I was hustling to get home, out too late on a Cinderella license (though I was coming from work so the local cops looked the other way for working teenagers) and slid on a turn on a small country road, hit the culvert which flipped the car on its roof. Three stitches in my head when the roof came down and hit the dash. Oh was I lucky. And I remembered that day, as an underwriter, knowing that all of us were going to have a bad day sometime. My job was to make sure the folks who had too many bad days were charged more so others could pay less. That was the theory...
ok, I'm going to try to be a little less jesty in my posts with new folks; this is not working out well and most of you know I mean to offend no one.
