Thanks for posting all this info. Unfortunately it makes for depressing reading, because I am not sure that USMS will be able to negotiate something significantly better than they have now. I hope I'm wrong. A new budget might be able to help LMSCs financially but the other requirements (prop guards, etc) dictated by the insurance companies may stay put no matter how many great ideas are generated by chaos' other thread and elsewhere.
Don't give up hope. If the premium increase was a result a claim arising from a particular type of risk, and that risk can be reduced or eliminated, then it can be reassessed. I haven't had the time to review the new policy, but what it effectively does is insert a new exclusion from coverage for injuries arising from the failure to have propeller guards (among other things). If a boat doesn't have one, and a person gets injured because there wasn't one on the boat, then that would not be covered under the policy. I don't know how the negotiations took place, but I suspect USMS received the premium notice of increase, and negotiated a reduced premium by putting certain safety safeguards in place. Those safeguards reduced the risk for the insurer because the safeguards supposedly would prevent those injuries which created the exposure for the insurer in the first place. By not complying with those safeguards the activity is taken out of the scope of coverage. Of course they still raised their rates because they probably took a closer look at the different kinds of OW events and determined there was an additional element of uncertainty in the risk they were assuming.
Thanks for posting all this info. Unfortunately it makes for depressing reading, because I am not sure that USMS will be able to negotiate something significantly better than they have now. I hope I'm wrong. A new budget might be able to help LMSCs financially but the other requirements (prop guards, etc) dictated by the insurance companies may stay put no matter how many great ideas are generated by chaos' other thread and elsewhere.
Don't give up hope. If the premium increase was a result a claim arising from a particular type of risk, and that risk can be reduced or eliminated, then it can be reassessed. I haven't had the time to review the new policy, but what it effectively does is insert a new exclusion from coverage for injuries arising from the failure to have propeller guards (among other things). If a boat doesn't have one, and a person gets injured because there wasn't one on the boat, then that would not be covered under the policy. I don't know how the negotiations took place, but I suspect USMS received the premium notice of increase, and negotiated a reduced premium by putting certain safety safeguards in place. Those safeguards reduced the risk for the insurer because the safeguards supposedly would prevent those injuries which created the exposure for the insurer in the first place. By not complying with those safeguards the activity is taken out of the scope of coverage. Of course they still raised their rates because they probably took a closer look at the different kinds of OW events and determined there was an additional element of uncertainty in the risk they were assuming.
