When you’re looking for ethically-challenged business practices, Florida is usually a good place to begin. The latest kerfluffle involves a toxic combination of very high deductibles for workers comp insurance and employee leasing companies. Oklahoma based Park Avenue Property and Casualty Insurance sold policies with deductibles as high as $1 million to PEOs. Think about that for a moment: a million dollar deductible is virtually self-insurance, as very few claims break that formidable barrier. Park Avenue, along with its successor companies, sold these policies to employee leasing companies, who in turn passed the coverage through to their client companies. With such a huge deductible, the coverage must have been relatively inexpensive compared to standard market rates.
Under large deductible programs, the insurance company pays all the bills and then seeks reimbursement from the client company, up to the deductible amount. It’s not hard to figure out the flaw in this business model: client companies will welcome the discounted premiums, but when it comes time to pay back the insurer for paid losses, they will be unable to cut the checks. Given the complete absence of regulatory-mandated collateralization for the claims liability, there is no way the insurer will be reimbursed for large loss claims.
That’s where the three-card Monte comes in: the insurer wrote these policies knowing full well that the deductibles would never be paid. That’s why Park Avenue morphed into Pegasus Insurance, which morphed into Southern Eagle Insurance, which flies off into the pastel sunset of bankruptcy.
Gaming Risk Transfer
The cards have been moved around at blinding speed, but who ends up paying? Once again, those who played by the rules will have to pay for those who didn’t. (For a more egregious example of punishing the innocent, see our blogs on the New York Trusts.) Policy holders in Florida will be charged somewhere between 2% and 3.5% of premiums to cover the $100 million plus of losses.
In the WorkComp Central article by Jim Sams (subscription required), Paul Hughes, CEO of Risk Transfer Company, which markets insurance to PEOs, complains that singling out the PEO industry is unfair. The state should never have allowed Park Avenue and its winged successors to write insurance, as they were clearly incapable of assuming the risk. True enough, but even Hughes would have to admit that the PEO industry offered a ripe venue for the scam: individually, PEO clients would never have qualified for high deductible coverage, but somehow, under the collective umbrella of a PEO, they did.
Meanwhile, PEOs are being sued for failing to reimburse the claims payments of Park Avenue and its successors. After the PEOs lose these cases, they will seek payment from their clients, who are unlikely to have the ability to pay anywhere near what is owed. The litigation will go on for a long time, but the bottom line is simple: risk transfer cannot exist where none of the parties can cover the exposure. That isn’t risk transfer: it’s a shell game, where those who did not play are left holding the bag.
Follow Up – June 7, 2012
After posting this blog, I received a call from Paul Hughes, CEO of Risk Transfer in Florida, who is quoted above. While not contesting the premise that large deductibles are poorly managed in Florida (and elsewhere), he believes that I unfairly singled out PEOs in the blog. The fundamental issue is the failure of the state to adequately regulate and oversee large deductible programs. I agree.
Please take a few moments to read Paul’s response, which employs the useful metaphor of a casino for the risk transfer industry:

The core issue to me is the role of the regulator versus the business owner in the management of the “casino” (insurance marketplace). That is one of the parts of Jon’s article in Workers Comp Insider that blurs the line a bit on what the PEO’s role is within the casino and whose job it is to set the rules. The casino is the State as they certify the dealers to play workers’ compensation (Carriers, MGU’s, MGA’s, Agents and Brokers) and the State also certifies that the players are credible (not convicted of insurance fraud) and can pay/play by the rules of the house. The rules are set by the house and the games all require public filings – ability to write workers’ compensation (certificate of authority), ability to offer a large deductible plan (large deductible filings), agent license, agency license, adjusters license and any other deviation from usual business practices (like the allegations that one now defunct insurance carrier illegally charged surplus notes to desperate PEO’s in the hardest market the industry has ever seen). The “three-card monte” that Jon alludes to in this article is managed not by the dealers (carriers), but by the house (state). Would a real life casino consider it prudent to allow one of their dealers to expose 20% of their $5m in surplus through high deductibles sold to PEO’s with minimal financial underwriting and inadequate collateralization? Would any casino write harder to place (severity-driven) clients to include USL&H, roofers etc with the minimum amount of surplus needed to even operate a carrier…? Of course not. These “big boy” bets would never be allowed in Vegas without the pockets being deep enough to cover the losses.