The American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA) on Thursday announced its 2024 advocacy priorities, including a focus on curbing rampant legal system abuse and supporting risk-based pricing.

“This year, APCIA will focus on proactively engaging in nine high priority areas, in addition to tackling the day-to-day challenges facing the property-casualty insurance industry,” APCIA’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, Stef Zielezienski, said in a statement. “Foremost among those priority areas is working to curb rampant legal system abuse, in coordination with the broader business community. The abuses of our judicial system by the plaintiffs’ bar and their allies are wide-ranging, impacting insurance affordability and availability in many states, as well as the ability of businesses to remain viable.”

Priority areas include:

1. Working to curb rampant legal system abuse.
2. Supporting risk-based pricing and related rating and underwriting tools.
3. Addressing innovation, regulatory modernization, insurance industry talent and economic empowerment.
4. Catastrophe insurance challenges (including adoption of relevant recommendations from the federal Wildland Fire Mitigation & Management Commission Report).
5. Ensuring the sustainability and soundness of the state-based workers compensation system.
6. Protecting insurance contract certainty against legislative, regulatory or judicial overreach.
7. Addressing automobile insurance cost drivers.
8. Preserving a sound taxation structure for property-casualty insurance.
9. Advancing international trade, market access and regulatory modernization.

APCIA said it will also address “important issues that cut across multiple priority areas, including opposing arbitrary and prescriptive ESG-related mandates that inhibit insurers from carrying out the business of insurance, addressing false narratives perpetrated about the industry, and identifying government intrusion risk that threatens the insurance affordability and availability to consumers.”

Source: APCIA