Has anyone ever read about how Lloyd’s insurance payouts work? It’s kind of crazy. This touches on it, but I can’t find a good, short article.
Lloyd’s is not an insurance company; it is a market of members. As the oldest continuously active insurance marketplace in the world, Lloyd’s has retained some unusual structures and practices that differ from all other insurance providers today. Originally created as a non-incorporated association of subscribing members, it was incorporated by the Lloyd’s Act 1871 and is currently governed under the Lloyd’s Acts of 1871 through to 1982.
Lloyd’s itself does not underwrite insurance business, leaving that to its members. Instead, the Society operates effectively as a market regulator, setting rules under which members operate and offering centralised administrative services to those members.
On the upside, social distancing is working and saving lives. Now let’s see how long it takes to dump the whole thing as “too expensive” and go back to just let 'em die?
Short version: private individual members, (known as “Names” in Lloyd’s parlance) invest in Lloyd’s and assume unlimited liability for claims. Many have been financially ruined by far lesser crises.
I saw a documentary on Lloyd’s a few years ago. In it, a Lloyd’s senior executive was quoted as saying of the Names, “If God did not want them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep”.
I think I saw that documentary too. Back in the early '90s?
IIRC, Lloyd’s is a sort of a pyramid scheme that for decades (centuries?) invited only the wealthy and privileged to join, and would pay out annual dividends to members.
Then in the late '80s, Lloyd’s was exposed to a whole load of disasters all at once - A hurricane in the UK, the Piper Alpha oil rig fire, the King’s Cross fire, the capsizing of the Spirit of Free Enterprise and a whole load of others.
So Lloyd’s lowered the bar for entry and invited pretty much any old yuppie to join, and then fleeced them all.
How does that even work? Farm workers are already not covered by minimum wage laws, and a lot of them are undocumented. They have close to zero legal protections anyway, so I don’t see how the feds can really give them even less protections.
