Fitch: US Life Exposure to WC Carve-Out Still Huge

US life insurance companies remain precipitously exposed to the Unicover debacle of the late 1990's, which was more responsible for the dramatic increase in workers' compensation rates than any other single event during the last decade, according to a new report issued by Fitch Ratings.In a conference call to the media yesterday, Fitch analyst Doug Polowski said that the U.S. life insurance industry in the mid to late 1990s was subsidizing cheap work comp pricing in retrocessionary deals with artificially low strike points for taking on risk. In addition to extraordinary stock market gains dur...