Historically, the insurance industry in America has been fragmented. As a result, there have been debates and conflicts over the proper roles of federal and state governments, business, and the responsibilities of individuals. Who should cover the risks of loss? And to what extent should risk be shared and by whom?
In Uncovered, Katherine Hempstead answers these questions by exploring the history of the insurance business and its regulation in the United States from the 1870s through the twentieth century. Specifically, she focuses on the friction between the public demand for insurance and the private imperatives of insurers. Tracing the history of the industry from the early days of life, fire, and casualty insurance to the development of state regulation in the late nineteenth century, Hempstead examines the role that insurers initially played in the largely voluntary social safety net and how this changed over time. After the Great Depression, the federal government assumed a greater role in the provision of insurance, while insurers enthusiastically pursued the growing business of employee benefits. As the twentieth century progressed, insurers and government have become interdependent, with insurers participating in publicly funded markets. As Hempstead shows, periodic crises in life, fire, health, auto, and liability insurance highlighted gaps between the coverage that insurers were willing to provide and what the public demanded.
Highlighting how the major part states play in insurance regulation has made it harder to solve important problems, Uncovered fundamentally changes our understanding of the crucial role that insurance has always played in American politics.
Industry Reviews
"This is a persistently interesting, invaluable contribution that doesn't just illuminate the history of the private insurance business in the United States. It also puts the development of government regulation and social insurance into a fresh perspective." --Paul Starr, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs and Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs, Princeton University, and author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine
"Uncovered offers an accessible introduction to the history of life, health, and property casualty insurance in the United States, from the end of the Civil War to the present. Hempstead's detailed treatment of the regulatory structures that govern the industry makes this book a valuable contribution to the history of insurance-and a useful guide for those who seek change in the future." --Caley D. Horan, Assistant Professor of History, MIT, and
author of The Insurance Era
"Uncovered masterfully charts the history and consequences of middle-class America's embrace of private insurance, and of the insurance industry's successful efforts to avoid federal regulation. Told with compelling narrative and verve, Hempstead's story illuminates the patchwork of insurance products and state-based regulation that leaves too many people uncovered." --Tom Baker, William Maul Measey Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey
Law School
"Most of us only worry about insurance after a calamity--a car accident, flood or fire, illness or death in the family. Kathy Hempstead's book is a powerful and fascinating account of how state and federal regulators have struggled over the last 150 years to ensure that insurance products help consumers recover from their mishaps rather than make things worse. Her well-chosen stories about policyholder loss, combined with revealing profiles of industry leaders
(and more than a few charlatans), highlight the successes and expose the failures of insurance regulators in channeling industry ingenuity toward serving the public interest." --Joel Ario, Former
insurance commissioner in Pennsylvania and Oregon
"Insurance plays a vital part in the lives of most people, but until now the story of how the American insurance system evolved has remained largely untold. In Uncovered, Katherine Hempstead has performed a great service by telling that history and tracing the central tensions that have shaped it--tensions between individual responsibility and efforts to socialize the costs of misfortune, between private and public insurance, and between federal and
state regulation of the insurance industry. Hempstead ably combines lucid explanation of the technical aspects of insurance history with vivid examples of how its shifting currents have impacted everyday
Americans. Her book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the modern world of American insurance came to be." --Joseph A. Ranney, Adjunct Professor and Schoone Fellow, Marquette Law School
"The text is peppered with stories of individual policy holders and industry leader profiles that exemplify industry successes and failures. Hempstead also addresses the correlative connection between the government and insurers and the resulting publicly funded markets causing persistent problems with obtaining affordable insurance, underscoring the challenge of keeping society as a whole insured. Advocates and insurance wonks can use this book as a guide for
future industry reformation." -- Choice
