Tag Archives: California

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.

Easter Quake Damage “Will Not Exceed $1B”

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As you all know by now, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck along the Mexican/California border yesterday, severely damaging some structures in Mexico but causing only minor disruptions — and a big scare — for those in Southern California, despite being the biggest shock to hit the area in two decades. According to risk modeling company EQECAT, most of the economic damage occurred in Mexico (Mexicali, specifically) and overall losses will not exceed $1 billion, with insured losses totaling $300 million.

Reports EQECAT:

Although damage will have occurred in both Mexico and the US, the community of Mexicali is the largest urban area affected by this event, and damage there is expected to be widespread. The largest US city affected by the earthquake is El Centro, California, although significantly less damage is expected there than in Mexicali, due both to lower-intensity ground shaking and less-vulnerable structures.

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Structures with greater earthquake resistance may have experienced slight to moderate damage. The intensity of shaking that occurred in El Centro and other US locations is below the threshold typically associated with structural damage.

This earthquake ruptured on the Laguna Salada fault, whose last major earthquake occurred in 1892, to the northwest of yesterday’s rupture.

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Another historic earthquake that affected the region was the 1940 Imperial Valley (US) earthquake (M6.9), which caused strong shaking in the US cities of El Centro and Brawley. Buildings damaged in 1940 will have been repaired or replaced, and highly-vulnerable buildings were not reconstructed in the El Centro region.

However, border cities such as Mexicali had not experienced shaking as severe as from yesterday’s quake for nearly 100 years. Consequently, many buildings in Mexicali will have been at risk to major damage, particularly older commercial and residential structures, and particularly those built of unreinforced masonry.

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Unreinforced masonry buildings have consistently demonstrated vulnerability to damage from earthquakes.

Let’s hope any after shocks do minimal harm.

ABC also offers the following video report.

Risk Management Links of the Day: 12.16.09

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janet napolitano DHS

  • 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?”

Find an interesting link? Email me any stories, videos or images you come across and would like to see included. Or just follow me on Twitter @RiskMgmt and pass it along that way.

Wildfires Ravage Southern California

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A state of emergency has been declared in California as an out of control wildfire spreads through the Los Angeles foothills. It has been reported that the fire “nearly doubled in size overnight” with total acreage burned amounting to 35,000.

“These fires are still totally out of control,” California Gov.

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Schwarzenegger said at the fire’s command post in Lakeview Terrace.

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“This is a huge and very dangerous fire. The fire is moving very close to homes and to structures.”

The fires are currently threatening more than 12,000 buildings and residents of 10,000 homes have been told to evacuate. 2,000 firefighters are working to contain the blaze as the weather forecast projects continued hot, dry weather. Two firefighters died Sunday when their vehicle rolled off a hillside near Mount Gleason in the Angeles National Forest.

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The most costly wildfire to date is the 1991 Oakland, California fire, which resulted in estimated insured losses of $2.7 billion (in 2008 dollars). The National Interagency Coordination Center lists the top ten states for wildland fires, ranked by number of fires for 2008:

  • Texas                        16,713       1,570,586
  • California                  5,812          1,339,839
  • Oklahoma                 5,572          196,563
  • Georgia                     5,454          23,081
  • North Carolina          4,414           95,938
  • Alabama                   3,103           32,447
  • Florida                      2,939           156,102
  • South Carolina         2,626           15,751
  • Mississippi               1,898           27,399
  • Arizona                     1,850           85,496

The Insurance Information Institute states that “most of the large fires with significant property damage have occurred in California, where some of the fastest developing counties are in forest areas.” Stay tuned as we continue to post updates on the wildfire situation, and the losses resulting from it.