Declarations

Better Protection Against Insolvency

“We’ve long had the ability to intervene when a company is insolvent. … But to protect policyholders, we need to step in much sooner than that. This new law lets insurers know exactly what we’ll be looking at and when that intervention will occur.”

—John M. Huff, director of the Missouri Department of Insurance, said a new law signed by Gov. Jay Nixon imposes tighter oversight over financially strapped insurance companies in Missouri. Senate Bill 583, which took effect Aug. 28, spells out the specific standards the Department of Insurance will use to determine when an insurer is in a hazardous financial condition. SB 583 allows regulators to work with insurers at increased risk of insolvency and create action plans to make them more stable.

Flooding and Urban Sprawl

“Changes in the land’s surface feed back to runoff. Urban sprawl and impervious surfaces are the biggest culprits.”

—Bryan Pijanowski, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University, said that controlling urban growth and increasing forested land are the most effective ways to decrease future water runoff and flooding. He used a model to simulate Michigan’s Muskegon River watershed runoff rates from 1900 through the present and forecast them 30 years into the future. Several scenarios, including forest regrowth, urbanization, and buffers between development and streams, were analyzed to estimate their impact on rivers and streams. Pijanowski said urban areas in the United States would double in 20 years at the current rate. The model predicts doubling the urban area in the Muskegon River watershed would increase runoff by 1 1/2 times. Pijanowski’s findings, published in the early online version of the journal Environmental Management, suggest that slowing the rate of urban sprawl would be the most effective way to reduce or control runoff.

Staggering Costs

“Every 10 seconds, someone in the United States is treated in an emergency department for crash-related injuries, and nearly 40,000 people die from these injuries each year.”

—Dr. Grant Baldwin, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Unintentional Injury Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. A CDC study has found that in a one-year period, the cost of medical care and productivity losses associated with injuries from motor vehicle crashes exceeded $99 billion – with the cost of direct medical care accounting for $17 billion. The total annual cost amounts to nearly $500 for each licensed driver in the U.S. The study in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention found that the one-year costs of fatal and non-fatal crash-related injuries totaled $70 billion (71 percent of total costs) for people riding in motor vehicles, such as cars and light trucks, $12 billion for motorcyclists, $10 billion for pedestrians, and $5 billion for bicyclists

Topics USA