Massachusetts Slides Another Spot In Ranking Of Largest Insurance Market By Premium

This is the 31st edition of the NAIC’s annual Insurance Department Resources Report

As luck would have it, with the NAIC in Boston for its 2018 Summer Meeting, the Association released Volume II of its annual Insurance Department Resources Report (IDRR). The Report, released in two separate volumes each year, has been published annually for the past 31st years.

While the first of the two-volume report focuses on the resources and regulatory activities of the 56 NAIC-member jurisdictions, Volume Two, compiled through an extensive survey of each of the NAIC member states, focuses on “… premium data [as well as providing]…ratios that demonstrate the relationships between the budget, revenue and premium data.

A snapshot of 2017

The following are four take-aways from this year’s overall report from the past year in the U.S. insurance marketplace.

1. California reported the largest 2019 budget, which is $58.8 million greater than the second-largest 2019 budget (New York).
2. Total taxes collected increased by 3.3 percent.
3. There were 5,954 domestic U.S. insurers in 2017 and 81 in Massachusetts.
4. State insurance departments received nearly 300,000 official complaints and more than 1.7 million inquiries.

Premiums

The following charts take a look at aggregate premium volume in the U.S. over the last nine years.

The next chart provides a breakdown of premium volume by line of business in 2017: Property/Casualty provides approximately 26.2% of all written premium volume as measured by lines of business. Both Health (43%) and Life/Annuities (29.7%), however, actually provide more premium volume than Property/Casualty with a combined total of 72.7%.

The top ten states with the most premium written

The top ten states with the most written premiums for 2017 were the following:

1. 1. California with $339,880,531,962 in premium (Rank last year 1)
   2. New York with $167,361,850,575 in premium (Rank last year 2)
   3. Texas with $160,162,581,679 in premium (Rank last year 3)
   4. Florida with $154,894,607,731 in premium (Rank last year 4)
   5. Pennsylvania with $100,169,586,484 in premium (Rank last year 5)
   6. Ohio with $84,354,610,356 in premium (Rank last year 7)
   7. Illinois with $82,396,298,518 in premium (Rank last year 6)
   8. New Jersey with $74,240,054,377 in premium (Rank last year 8)
   9. Delaware with $70,895,026,000 in premium (Rank last year 10)
   10. Michigan with $68,985,980,280 in premium (Rank last year 9)

Together, just the top five markets alone accounted for 40.2%, of all insurance premiums in the United States in 2017 and remained unchanged from last year, when their combined total accounted for 40.6% of the total amount of insurance premiums.

Massachusetts slips to the 12th spot when ranking it by premium vis a vis other states

Mirroring its ranking for the past couple of years, Massachusetts slid another spot in 2017 to place as the 12th largest marketplace in the country.

As for total premium volume, Massachusetts logged $53,492,161,175 last year, as compared to $52,943,560,858 in 2016. The breakdown of premium by lines of insurance is as follows:

• $18,746,549,777 was written in the Life/Annuities line of business,
•  $14,387,432,240 in the Property/Casualty line of business, and
• $19,828,727,197 in Health.

While Massachusetts continues to have no captive insurers, its does have a healthy Excess and Surplus market with a total of $1,050,090,481 in premium volume for 2017. Of that $719,095,404 of that premium was U.S.-based while the remaining $330,995,077 represented Alien Excess and Surplus insurers.

To view Agency Checklists’ look at Volume One of the NAIC’s 2017 Insurance Department Report with respect to Massachusetts, please refer to our July 31, 2018 article entitled, “Massachusetts Division of Insurance Facts, Figures & Statistics For 2017.”