Elizabeth Mitchell received a notice from her commercial property insurance company in April that set off alarm bells.
Acadia Insurance, the insurer for the market, workspace, and wellness-center nonprofit she runs in West Cornwall, Connecticut, would no longer cover “bodily injury, property damage or personal and advertising injury” from “contact with, exposure to, existence of, or presence of any ‘PFAS.’”
PFAS, as Mitchell soon discovered, is short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which appear in everything from clothing to cleaning products to cookware and are linked to a wide range of health risks. Since most of these toxic substances don’t break down and are now found in the blood of people all over the world, they’ve earned the nickname “forever chemicals.”
I work as an independent casualty actuary, the people who do the math and make the rates for risk pools like insurance companies. The words I write here are my own and represent no client or actuarial organization.
The author of this article writes:
“It’s really a function of a completely unregulated industry,” said Dorowshow. “They don’t have any federal regulation.”
The first assertion is simply wrong, the industry if very effectively regulated by the states. The second statement is mostly correct but implies this is a negative instead of a plus. Actually the states have consistently done a better job regulating insurance than the feds. The Lever often writes about health insurance issues, health insurance is mostly regulated at the federal level, other insurance is regulated mostly at the state level. AIG blew up due to federally 'regulated' credit default swap derivatives, but its insurance subsidiaries were fire-walled by state regulation from this crap in the AIG holding company. The holding company would never get needed permission from the states to use any insurance funds to pay its corporate gambling debts.
I love what the Lever strives to do. I wish you folks would take a step back from adopting a broad anti-insurance industry posture and do more legwork. FYI, I was a Friday health insurance customer. I am not writing from a personal disconnect. Consider the 10,000s of hail, tornado and fire claims settled each year without major drama versus the federal FEMA flood insurance debacles. Insurance markets other than health are not perfect but are more competitive markets than banking or other finance. Their regulators are much less industry-captured too.
It would serve your readers and the public better to ask why anyone, even a for-profit law firm, would feel it right to sue a small business for taking a drink at their water fountain because the municipal water supply was polluted by somebody else. Ask another attorney what they think of that legal theory before accepting it as a baseline reality. How about a little pushback from the Lever in defense of the little guys and gals you purport to fight for? Never mind that the small business (or its insurer) would likely sue the municipality for supplying unsafe water, making more lawyers richer and more correctly assigning responsibility as the municipality would sue DuPont, 3M, who would spin off that sub into bankruptcy, more attorneys.......vomit.
why would anyone sue a small business? LOL. You don't get around much. ANY metropolitan area like NYC is RIFE with small business suits. A small BBQ chicken eatery near me did some renovations, bingo, sued by their tiny contractor for "unsafe work environment" now claiming lifelong disability. Countless small businesses get sued for a lack of overtime tracking systems, whereby even minimum wage workers claim they're owed huge amounts of back pay at time and a half rates. You ever look into how many websites get sued for lack of ADA "text-to-speech" translation so the "blind" can "enjoy" the website without discrimination? How many small mom and pop shops have wheelchair ramps? Sued! You need to get around and see the big picture.