Homeowners need to be able to buy good insurance coverage and understand what they are buying. When losses occur, insurance companies need to deliver on the protection they have promised. The Essential Protections for Policyholders project analyzes and recommends state laws that make sure that happens.
Overview
The Roadmap
Every state regulates homeowners insurance and insurance companies, but states differ dramatically in how much and what kind of regulation they provide for the benefit of policyholders. Essential Protections for Policyholders addresses state regulation of homeowners insurance, analyzing key issues, surveying current law, and recommending action. The report draws on an extensive database of state laws and on the experience of United Policyholders, the nation’s leading support and advocacy organization for insurance consumers. The Essential Protections provide a roadmap in four categories that every state can follow in improving homeowners insurance.
Read a summary of the Essential Protections
The Rankings
The Essential Protections also provide a scorecard to evaluate states’ current systems of regulation and to identify areas for improvement. How well does each state measure up in providing consumers the Essential Protections? The project is issuing a series of reports on state-by-state rankings of key issues.
Read about the state-by-state rankings
Essential Protections When Buying Insurance
Consumers need readily available, easily understandable information about the insurance policies available to them and the insurance companies that offer those policies to shop effectively for insurance. The Essential Protections aim to give consumers full, understandable information about insurance policies and insurance companies so that they can make wise buying decisions and to create competition among companies that leads to better products and fairer prices.
Read more about Buying Insurance
Essential Protections for Coverage
All homeowners need basic protection from their insurance policies and many buy additional protection. The Essential Protections require that policies contain minimum guarantees of protection and that companies offer some kinds of additional protection. Policyholders also need to be protected against unfair cancellation or nonrenewal of their policies, and the Essential Protections set standards there, too.
Essential Protections in the Claims Process
The protection and security that an insurance policy provides must be guaranteed by a fair and efficient claims process. The Essential Protections require insurance companies to provide information to insureds about the claims process and to implement reasonable standards for processing, investigating, evaluating, and paying claims.
Read more about the Claims Process
Essential Protections for Disaster Victims
Policyholders who suffer losses due to natural disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, or tornadoes face all of the potential problems that other policyholders confront and more. Many of the Essential Protections for Policyholders that apply in other circumstances are extremely important for disaster victims as well but disaster victims need additional protections as well.
Read more about Disaster Victims
Policyholder Protections Blog
Essential Protections as a Standard for Insurers and Insurtech
The Essential Protections for Policyholders provide a roadmap for states to follow in regulating homeowners insurance and a scorecard to evaluate states’ current systems of regulation. Although the Essential Protections are directed at regulators, many of the individual items also can be used to measure how well an insurance company measures up to standards that insurers should adhere to.
Read more about Essential Protections
The Market for Ignorance in Insurance
Insurance is mostly sold on the basis of ignorance, not information. That needs to change.
Current Law on Essential Protections
In each of the Essential Protections for Policyholders, the report identifies and discusses an issue, recommends action that legislatures or sometimes insurance commissioners should take, usually offers recommended statutory language, and provides context in a summary of current law. Like other scholarship in the law and public policy realm, it requires a certain amount of self-confidence to offer a “best” solution to difficult and important issues.
Read more for Current Law on Essential Protections
Who did this work?
Essential Protections for Policyholders is a project of the Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility at Rutgers Law School in cooperation with United Policyholders.
What protections are essential for homeowners?
States regulate many aspects of homeowners insurance, and the Essential Protections for Policyholders project focuses on those that are—essential. We had two selection criteria for deciding what to include.
About the project
Essential Protections for Policyholders is a project of the Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility in cooperation with United Policyholders.
The Rutgers Center for Risk and Responsibility at Rutgers Law School explores the ways in which society makes choices about risk, its proper allocation, and compensation for the harm caused when risks materialize.
United Policyholders is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to be a trustworthy and useful information resource and a respected voice for consumers of all types of insurance in all fifty states.