SEATTLE–An insurance trade group official briefing her membership today said that the Bush administration has reacted positively to the organization's lobbying for a terrorism backstop measure that takes into account the interests of small and medium-sized carriers.

That report came from June Holmes, interim chief executive officer for Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, in a talk at PCI's annual meeting here.

Ms. Holmes said that in a meeting last week with Jim Wilkinson, chief of staff for Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., Mr. Wilkinson had “praised us for the 'small insurer' and 'small consumer' aspects of our message and urged us to continue to hammer this home with policymakers and opinion leaders.”

She said that in lobbying on the issues involved with the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which expires at the end of 2007, PCI is working for “a long-term, market-based solution to the terrorism insurance problem.”

In speaking with Mr. Wilkinson, Ms. Holmes said, “We emphasized that the solution should not put the federal government in the position of picking winners and losers based on the size of a commercial insurance buyer's business, the type of weapon used in an attack, or the size of the company that provides its property and liability insurance.”

She referred to Mr. Wilkinson in her talk only as a “Treasury official” but identified him later in an interview. Ms. Holmes told her audience he had indicated that while the Treasury has been heavily lobbied on TRIA and that “every building on Wall Street” is “beating the hinges off the doors,” PCI is the only group “talking about the needs of small and medium-sized companies.”

According to Ms. Holmes, Mr. Wilkinson also said that the small-company issue will be important as Treasury and White House policy is determined, and she promised the membership that “we intend to be in the thick of the policy development process.”

Ms. Holmes told National Underwriter that the organization is seeking a middle layer of protection that would be achieved by lowering some of the loss triggers for government support of insurers after an attack.

Gerald Whitburn, PCI's outgoing chairman, said in an interview that the message the group is pressing is that “we mustn't limit the parameters of the TRIA response to the giant insurers only. We have a variety of high quality, long-standing niche players who assume very significant roles in the market.

“Such things as the trigger placement should respond to those realities,” he said. “A company that writes a half-billion in premium finds itself in the top 10-to-15 percent of premium writers in the industry.”

On another political front, Ms. Holmes told her audience that PCI had funded more than half the cost for a campaign to defeat the Oregon Measure 42 ballot initiative on credit scoring that was before voters today.

The proposition would ban credit scoring, which she said PCI leadership feels would be “a dangerous precedent for other states” and trigger a widespread effort to ban not only the use of credit history, “but other proven, effective underwriting factors in states across the country.”

She said PCI funded polling and found that “if framed properly, voters understood the potential downsides–in terms of higher rates for many…” if they voted to approve the measure. Pre-election polls, she said, find 60 percent now opposed the measure.

Special Reports /

PCI Pushes Small-Insurer TRIA Agenda

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