Tag Archives: Michigan

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Where Questionable Insurance Claims Come From

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Wanna blame someone for your high insurance premiums?

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Point to the residents of California, Florida, Texas, New York and Michigan.

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Combined, these five states generate half of the nation’s questionable insurance claims — most of which are either suspect auto policy submissions or fake injury claims.

These states account for 49 percent of all “questionable claims” as tabulated by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB).

Questionable claims are those claims that NICB member insurance companies refer to NICB for closer review and investigation based upon one or more indicators of possible fraud.

NICB just released its three-year analysis of questionable claims in the United States from January 1, 2008 through December 31, 2010.

New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Tampa and Detroit are the cities generating the most QCs. Florida has three cities in the top 10 for QCs—Tampa, Miami and Orlando.

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Of course, a large reason that these states have so many fishy claims is that they are so large. Some 110 million people live in the five states mentioned.

But while they do contain about 36% of the nation’s population, that doesn’t actually explain why these locations create 49% of the questionable claims.

Invasion of the Carp

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Asian carp are headed to the Great Lakes and neighboring states are not happy about it.

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The fish, which are considered an invasive species and a threat to the ecosystem of the lakes, have prompted the state of Michigan to sue the state of Illinois, the City of Chicago and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to force them to protect the region’s $7 billion fishing industry by permanently closing the Chicago-area waterways that separate the Mississippi River from Lake Michigan. The states of Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana have all joined in supporting the suit while the Canadian province of Ontario has also expressed an interest in participating in the effort to stop the carp.

Originally Asian carp were introduced to the United States in the 1970s by catfish farmers who used the bottom-dwelling fish to clean out the algae and other debris from their ponds.

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But when the ponds were flooded in the 1990s, the carp found their way into the Mississippi River where they have been moving north and wreaking havoc on indigenous species ever since.

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While protecting the Great Lakes’ ecosystem seems like an obvious priority, Illinois officials are concerned that closing the waterways, specifically the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, will not only damage the area’s barge industry but will force a reconfiguration of wastewater disposal methods, which are currently handled by the 100-year-old canal.

“While we recognize that Asian carp pose a significant threat to the Great Lakes,” said Suzanne Malec-McKenna, the commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment, “shutting down the waterway system in Northeastern Illinois before fully understanding the impact it would have on the movement of people, goods and storm water is a shortsighted answer to a complex problem.”

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is expected to respond to the suit sometime today.

carp

Risk Management Links of the Day: 12.16.09

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  • Department of Homeland Security Fail: “Tahaya Buchanan, an American fugitive who’d been on the run for more than two years, dodging a national arrest warrant for insurance fraud, has spent her years underground gainfully employed by the Department of Homeland Security.
  • Our homeland security watchdog is doing something right, however, as DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday announced a “first of its kind federal-state cybersecurity partnership” between the department and the state of Michigan. As someone who reads dozens of horrible press releases every day, I can assure you that this is one of the least informative press releases ever written (and, not for nothing, DHS could probably use some proofreaders), but the gist of this thing seems to center around some sort of collaborative IT system to uncover malware and cyberattacks — or something.
  • With the financial collapse bankrupting Iceland and putting once-low-risk economies like those of Greece and Latvia on the ropes, Ellen Brown looks at how even the developed world nations of the EU are now bucking IMF debt-repayment protocols. And as former fat cats like Dubai have shown, today’s global climate means that even formerly nonvolatile nations need to be given more scrutiny when it comes to credit risks. “Dozens of countries have defaulted on their debts in recent decades, the most recent being Dubai, which declared a debt moratorium on November 26, 2009. If the once lavishly-rich Arab emirate can default, more desperate countries can; and when the alternative is to destroy the local economy, it is hard to argue that they shouldn’t.”
  • The video streaming site Justin.tv is under scrutiny for its inability to prevent its users from illegally uploading copyrighted content. Ultimately, this is the same fight that has been going on regarding digital intellectual property since Napster and, later, Kazaa gave rise to widespread music piracy across college campuses in the late 90s. YouTube faced similar scrutiny and many lawsuits and, like Napster, has used the “we’re not doing anything wrong — it’s our users” defense. But where Napster (and other, more brazen sharing sites like The Pirate Bay) failed, sites like YouTube have (thus far) been able to sidestep major legal recourse by having procedures (which, if we’re being honest, are only minimally effective) that ensure the removal of content if it is reported as infringing copyright. Getting back to the main story…Now under the threat of legal action, Justin.tv told its side of the story in front of the House Judiciary Committee this morning. “Justin.tv calls on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which they claim should provide them with a safe harbor for copyright-infringing content that appears on the website before they or the appropriate right owners get a chance to remove it … The startup states that it aims to bring live video into the mainstream much like Flickr, The Huffington Post and YouTube have done for online images, news and video clips. The question is: are they really doing everything they can to fight piracy?”

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