Insurance Law Commons^™

Insuring Takings Claims, Christopher Serkin

Northwestern University Law Review

Local governments typically insure themselves against all kinds of losses, from property damage to legal liability. For small- and medium-sized governments, this usually means purchasing insurance from private insurers or participating in municipal risk pools. Insurance for regulatory takings claims, however, is generally unavailable. This previously unnoticed gap in municipal insurance coverage could lead risk averse local governments to underregulate and underenforce existing regulations where property owners threaten to bring takings claims. This seemingly technical observation turns out to have profound implications for theoretical accounts of the Takings Clause that focus on government regulatory incentives. This Article explores the impact …

Resource Guide For Addiction And Mental Health Care Consumers: Answering Questions About Insurance Coverage And Parity For Addiction And Mental Health Care Services, Lucy C. Hodder, Michele D. Merritt, Margaret H. Schmidt, Jacqueline Botchman, Caitlyn Ebert, Marguerite Corvini, Kate Crary, Bridget Drake

Law Faculty Scholarship

Navigating the maze of health insurance coverage can be difficult. For individuals with addiction or mental illness, the process of getting treatment approved and paid for by health insurance can be overwhelming. As a result, many people give up when their health insurance company denies coverage for needed services. This Guide can help people learn how to access health insurance and use their coverage to pay for treatment. This Guide also provides a basic explanation of consumers’ rights under the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act.

Insuring Landslides: America’S Uninsured Natural Catastrophes, Christopher C. French

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Right To Reimbursement: Nevada Courts Should Follow The Trend And Forbid Insurers From Seeking Recoupment Of Defense Costs, Kristen Matteoni

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …

Sex, Videos, And Insurance: How Gawker Could Have Avoided Financial Responsibility For The $140 Million Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Verdict, Christopher French

Journal Articles

On March 18, 2016, and March 22, 2016, a jury awarded Terry Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) a total of $140 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Gawker Media for posting less than two minutes of a video of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend’s wife. The award was based upon a finding that Gawker intentionally had invaded Hulk Hogan’s privacy by posting the video online. The case has been receiving extensive media coverage because it is a tawdry tale involving a celebrity, betrayal, adultery, sex, and the First Amendment. The case likely will be remembered by most …

Sex, Videos, And Insurance: How Gawker Could Have Avoided Financial Responsibility For The $140 Million Hulk Hogan Sex Tape Verdict, Christopher French

Christopher C. French

The Insurability Of Claims For Restitution, Christopher French

Journal Articles

Does and should a wrongdoer’s liability insurance cover an aggrieved party’s claim for restitution (e.g., a claim for the disgorgement of ill-gotten gains)? This article answers those questions. It does so by first answering the question of whether claims for restitution are covered under the terms of liability insurance policies. Then, after concluding that they are, it addresses the question of whether claims for restitution should be insurable as a matter of public policy and insurance law theory. There are long-standing legal and equitable principles that, on the one hand, dictate that a wrongdoer should not be allowed to benefit …

The Insurability Of Claims For Restitution, Christopher French

Christopher C. French

The Insurability Of Claims For Restitution, Christopher French

Christopher C. French

Force-Placed Insurance: The Lending Industry's "Dirty Little Secret", Dana Cronkite

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Force-placed insurance, also called lender-placed insurance, is the insurance policy mortgage lenders obtain on behalf of borrowers when borrowers fail to maintain hazard insurance on their homes. Although the possibility of force-placed insurance is contemplated by mortgage contracts, the policies often provide little coverage and are much costlier than insurance policies acquired on the open market. Lenders obtain the policies at unfairly high prices and sometimes receive kickbacks from the force-placed insurance companies, while borrowers alone bear the burden of paying for them. As such, lenders have no incentive to obtain force-placed insurance at fair prices with adequate coverage. The …

Competition And Regulation In The Insurance Sector: Reassessing The Mccarran-Ferguson Act, Susan Beth Farmer

Susan Beth Farmer

This article was presented at a symposium entitled “Public and Private: Are the Boundaries in Transition?” sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute on June 24, 2010. It proposes a different paradigm, which more precisely describes regulation and competition in the insurance sector. This relationship is the shifting boundary between state and federal regulation instead of a boundary between the public and private sectors. The McCarran-Ferguson Act was adopted to protect firms acting in the business of insurance from federal antitrust scrutiny, but its language and impact goes far beyond federal competition law. So broad is the exemption that the modern …

The Battle To Define The Scope Of Attorney-Client Privilege In The Context Of Insurance Company Bad Faith: A Judicial War Zone, Steven Plitt, Joshua D. Rogers

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] "The attorney-client privilege is the "oldest of the privileges for confidential communications known to the common law."' The privilege is "[d]eeply rooted in public policy," and plays a 'vital role' in the administration of justice." As such, the privilege is "traditionally deemed worthy of maximum legal protection"' and "it remains one of the most carefully guarded privileges and is not readily to be whittled down." The privilege has come under assault in the insurance bad faith context in recent decades resulting in a "whittling down" of the privilege for insurance companies as a target party. Over the past couple …

An Arm And A Leg: Paying For Helicopter Air Ambulances, Henry Perritt

All Faculty Scholarship

An increase in Medicare reimbursement rates in 2002 caused the number of helicopter air ambulances in the United States to increase threefold. The vast majority of air ambulance flights are ultimately paid for through Medicare or private insurance reimbursement, although the patient often remains legally responsible for the cost of a flight. Average costs for helicopter air ambulance (HEMS) operators have increased much more rapidly than the reimbursement rate, mostly due to low utilization of the helicopters. New safety requirements imposed by the FAA, after a ten-year period of much higher accident rates for helicopter air ambulances than for the …

Reimagining The Risk Of Long-Term Care, Allison K. Hoffman

All Faculty Scholarship

U.S. law and policy on long-term care fail to address the insecurity American families face due to prolonged illness and disability — a problem that grows more serious as the population ages and rates of disability rise. This Article argues that, even worse, we have focused on only part of the problem. It illuminates two ways that prolonged disability or illness can create insecurity. The first arises from the risk of becoming disabled or sick and needing long-term care, which could be called “care-recipient” risk. The second arises out of the risk of becoming responsible for someone else’s care, which …

The Perverse Effects Of Subsidized Weather Insurance, Omri Ben-Shahar, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

This Article explores the role of insurance as a substitute for direct regulation of risks posed by severe weather. In pricing the risk of human activity along the predicted path of storms, insurance can provide incentives for efficient location decisions as well as for cost-justified mitigation efforts in building construction and infrastructure. Currently, however, much insurance for severe-weather risks is provided and heavily subsidized by the government. This Article demonstrates two primary distortions arising from the government’s dominance in these insurance markets. First, existing government subsidies are allocated differentially across households, resulting in a significant regressive redistribution favoring affluent homeowners …

The Government's Role In Climate Change Insurance, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

There are no robust insurance markets for climate change insurance. While these markets would provide valuable loss-mitigation incentives, at the same time giving financial certainty to individuals and businesses that face staggering future liabilities, existing efforts have produced a fragmented set of private and public products that provide only piecemeal coverage. This symposium contribution examines the government’s role in providing unified markets for insuring climate change risk. Although innovations in reinsurance markets suggest that private insurers could cover discrete risks associated with climate change, such as flood or wind loss, climate change’s broader systemic risks present problems of scale and …

The Ownership Of Health Insurers, Peter Molk

UF Law Faculty Publications

Spending by private health insurers exceeds $800 billion and is expected to rise. The Affordable Care Act provides $2 billion in subsidies to jump-start health insurers owned by their policyholders in an attempt to bring these costs under control. Firms with this corporate ownership structure have succeeded in other insurance markets, where Nationwide, Northwestern Mutual, and State Farm are just a few prominent examples. However, the potential of policyholder ownership in health insurance, which is dominated by investor and nonprofit ownership, is poorly understood. This Article applies theories of corporate ownership and control to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of …

A Battlefield Map For Nfl V. Insurance Industry Re: Concussion Liabilities, Christopher French

Christopher C. French

Revisiting Construction Defects As “Occurrences” Under Cgl Insurance Policies, Christopher French

Christopher C. French

Insuring Landslides: America’S Uninsured Natural Catastrophes, Christopher French

Christopher C. French