Product Shields Plans Against Multiple Hits

When pricing the product, "we spent a fair amount of time looking at data for multiple births," Fallahi says.

Quantifying the likelihood that other types of disasters will occur is more difficult, but ING Re actuaries see evidence that the incidence is increasing, Fallahi says.

ING Re excluded coverage for the results of terrorism to keep costs down.

Employers that are interested in the multiple-occurrence product should work closely with benefits advisors to see how the coverage would fit with standard aggregate coverage, says Stephen George, president of Provider Risk Inc., Miami, a reinsurance brokerage.

George also recommends that employers review their history of multiple-occurrence claims.

Fortunately, at most plans, "it is very rare to get the catastrophic hit, and tremendously rarer to get multiple-trauma, same-membership hits," George says.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, April 19, 2004. Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.