USI has served over 150,000 clients meeting their property & casualty, employee benefit, personal risk and retirement needs nationwide. It has more than 100 years of consulting and brokerage experience through acquired agencies. It has just published the 2018 Insurance Market Outlook – Insights from our national practice leaders

“In 2017, we saw a continued downward trend in workers’ compensation (WC), including a reduction in premium rates overall, particularly in the loss-sensitive marketplace.”

“Given the lack of deterioration in many larger carriers’ combined loss ratios, we expect similar aggressive targeting to grow market share in 2018. While returns for low-risk investment opportunities remain limited, the marketplace’s appetite for premium will drive aggressive – yet prudent- pricing. However, there is underwriting discipline for those clients with poor loss results, declining financials, residence in particular states (i.e. FL, CA, NY, and others) and those in more volatile industry classes.”

“Carriers will seek higher retentions as the result of client-specific loss severity or in circumstances when clients are pursuing greater premium savings.”

Other USI predictions for workers’ compensation:

– Loss-sensitive programs will either see flat rates or hikes as high as 5 percent, assuming clients have clean or improving loss experience. For those that are seeing worsening loss experience, rates in this category will increase more than 5 percent, and carriers will likely adjust their retention levels.
– For guaranteed-cost programs, USI sees rates ranging between 10 percent decreases to 10 percent jumps. Clients with very clean loss experience would escape changes, and pricing would also vary due to a client’s “specific state payroll distribution due to states’ legislative pressure on adequacy of rates,” according to the report.
– Medical cost inflation is expected to rise 6 percent year-over-year, and this upward trend will continue to affect workers’ compensation and loss liability totals.
– The industry can expect more increases in cost shifting from healthcare plans to workers’ compensation, due in part to problems with the Affordable Care Act.
– While self-insurance remains an alternative to insured workers’ compensation, USI says some states are becoming more conservative on their collateral position for many qualified self-insureds and more employers are “looking more closely at their existing self-insured status because of onerous associated administrative costs.”

The report also forecast trends in commercial market areas including property, general liability, umbrella liability, international, environmental, aviation, crime, cyber, medical malpractice; and kidnap, ransom and extortion.