The high-quality insurance reporting just keeps coming:

• NAII, Alliance aim to merge by Jan. 1
• NAII’s annual meeting features celebrity speakers, wheeling and dealing (talk about hard-hitting!)

Ever wonder why people keep building big fancy houses right next to natural tinderboxes like the forests of Southern California? Because the state government’s residual market insurance program makes sure their coverage is cheap, cheap, cheap, as Matt Welch explains cogently.

So, not only do the rest of the state’s insurance consumers pay for this below-market cost insurance, but the residents pay because they are kept ignorant of the true costs of where they choose to reside. If you distort the price, you distort the information.

Here’s a brief story I wrote for the magazine with some background about the decision to go national.

It recaps the rationale behind the publisher’s move on business and editorial grounds.

Here are a couple of stories resulting from my reporting at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners conference this week in Chicago.

• NAIC intends to modernize
• Study on scoring’s disparate impact tabled

I can’t say the meetings were exciting, exactly. It was as about as bureaucratic as it gets.

You’ve heard all about it, and now my long unawaited monster on surplus lines is finally here!

Ain’t ya glad?

Yeah, I try to report that every once in a while.

Web items up on Near North and Illinois’ new get-tough uninsured motorists laws.

My latest story, which ran on the cover of the most recent issue of Insurance Journal.

The lead:

It is nearly impossible to deny the impact the burgeoning Hispanic population has and will have on American culture and its markets. The marketplace for insurance is no exception.

Hispanics are now the country’s largest minority group, having officially overtaken African Americans in recent population estimates issued by the U.S. Census Bureau, which showed that in 2002 there were 38.8 million Hispanics in the United States, compared with 38.3 million African Americans. Hispanics accounted for nearly half of the country’s population increase of 7 million, to 288.4 million, since 2000.

Unless there is a steep economic decline in the United States lowering the demand for cheaper, less-skilled labor or precipitous growth in Mexico and the rest of Latin America reducing the supply of that labor, the U.S. Hispanic marketplace will only continue to grow.

It should be an interesting read, even if you’re not into insurance.

Here’s the lead:

Insurance is about numbers, and right now the numbers are depressing when it comes to minority and women agents in the business. In spite of the tremendous growth of minority populations in the United States and the success of women in many other business fields, both lag behind in the insurance business.

Go ahead, read the rest. I dare you.

At my latest story, on minority- and women-owned insurance agencies.

No — working hard! Aren’t you glad I don’t work in your office?

Read about: a convicted liar, tornado losses, the ratings game, or an insurance agents’ association president.

It’s all good. Heck, it’s all grrrreat!

Here’s part of a Q&A I did with Louisiana’s former insurance commissioner, who spent six months in federal prison for lying to an FBI agent.

He read more than 100 books, wrote a book about his ordeal and lost 26 pounds. Whichever prison Stewart winds up in will, I’m sure, be the most wonderfully decorated prison around.