The Insurance Law Center at the UConn School of Law is pleased to sponsor a semester-long series of talks covering new ideas in insurance. If you’re reading this, you probably know that insurance is not the staid, boring subject many believe it to be. Instead, it shapes—often decisively—many aspects of our lives, from limiting police misconduct to incentivizing better driving; from regulating self-driving cars to influencing how healthcare is delivered and priced. Throughout the spring semester, we’ve invited some of the world’s leading experts from the academy, the bar, and the world of insurance regulators to speak about current developments in their fields and to speculate about what the future will look like. These fascinating and important conversations are open to the public, and we hope you’ll join us.
| Livelihood Insurance January 21, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Michael Abramowizc, George Washington Law School Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller has argued for livelihood insurance, a financial derivative that would provide compensation when many individuals in a particular occupation suffer losses. This talk will explore why livelihood insurance did not emerge in time to protect workers in the last pandemic and what the government can do before the next crisis to protect workers in vulnerable professions. |
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The Year We Got: Covid, 2020 and the NAIC |
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| The Rules of Medical Necessity February 11, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Daniel Schwarcz, University of Minnesota Law School Historically, health insurance contracts have required coverage of virtually all “medically necessary,” “non-experimental,” care, with these terms being defined through broad standards. In recent years, however, health insurers’ contracts and practices have moved towards a more rules-based approach for defining covered health care. This talk explores how this shift undermines the effectiveness of traditional legal tools designed to constrain the risk of health insurers overreaching in coverage determinations, such as litigation, external review, internal review, and coverage mandates. |
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| Buying Data from Consumers The Impact of Monitoring Programs in U.S. Auto Insurance February 18, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Shoshana Vasserman, Stanford Business School What happens when insurers gain better information about the riskiness of their customers? The question is of tremendous importance as new techologies allow insurers to monitor customers' behavior and use that information to price their product. But little is known about the equilibrium effects of this kind of information--how is it priced, who agrees to provide it, what effect it has on competition among insurers, and how it affects overall welfare. This talk offers an empirical perspective on these issues. |
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| Genetic Non-Discrimination February 25, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Anya Prince, University of Iowa Law School Florida has recently passed legislation that bars life (and long-term care and disability) insurers from using genetic information in underwriting. This talk explores the intracacies of the legislation and discusses how effective it is likely to be. |
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| Workers Compensation, COVID-19 and Emerging Issues March 4, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Susan Donegan, National Council on Compensation Insurance Workers Compensation is the nation's oldest social insurance system and while it has adapted as the workplace evolves, its core components of payment for medical care and income replacement due to work-place injuries and disease remain the same. With COVID-19, the importance of these benefits, their cost, and the difficulties in demonstrating causality between infection and the workplace, has led states to review their workers compensation systems and consider whether to rebalance some of its central components. |
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| How Private Insurers Regulate Public Police March 11, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. John Rappaport, University of Chicago Law School Can insurance can be used to regulate police misconduct? How effective has it been in doing so, and why might it be an effective option going forward? This talk addresses these and related issues at the intersection of insurance and civil rights. |
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| Long Term Care Insurance March 25, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Tom Baker, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Long term care insurance is an inherently risky product, since the evolution of medical costs is subject to great uncertainty and since socio-legal risk is highly correlated across insureds. This talk explores how insurers manage such risks. |
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| Liability Claim Evaluation, Big Data, and the Persistence of Uncertainty April 1, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Patricia Born, Florida State University Outcomes of medical malpractice lawsuits reflect a great deal of uncertainty for insurers, despite their access to historical claims experience and evolving sources of “Big Data." Variations in how people recover from certain types of injuries and how juries perceive fault, for example, can have large effects on claim payout variability. This presentation explores the role of injury types, juries, and other factors that may explain why an insurer’s initial assessment of how a claim will evolve is often off the mark. |
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| InsurTech Adventures in Insurance Regulation: Windows, Walls and Trap Doors. April 8, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. Bill Goddard, Electromagnetic Advisors and UConn School of Law What happens when the world of technology meets the world of insurance? This talk offers an insider's account of how we got where we are, and where we're going from here. |
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Insuring an Evolving Mobility Ecosystem: |
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| Gender in Health Insurance Pricing April 22, 2021, 4 -5 p.m. John Cogan, University of Connecticut School of Law Gender rating—charging women higher premiums than men—is justified on the basis of actuarial fairness (each gender bears the cost of its own risk and does not subsidize the other). This reasoning ignores an underlying theoretical flaw in insurance classification theory: no matter what variables an insurer uses to classify risks, there will always be cross-subsidies and risk-based unfairness. Thus, I argue that using gender as a rating variable is a policy choice by insurers, not an actuarial or economic necessity. |
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