INSURANCE IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
SCOPE OF INSURANCE IN USA
Insurance in the america refers to the market for risk in the United States, the world's largest insurance market by premium volume.[1] Of the $4.3 trillion of gross premiums written worldwide in 2013, $1.374 trillion were written in the United States.[1] Insurance, generally, is a contract in which the insurer mutual insurance company, reciprocal, or Lloyd's syndicate, for example), agrees to compensate or indemnify another party (the insured, the policyholder or a beneficiary) for specified loss or damage to a specified thing (e.g., an item, property or life) from certain perils or risks in exchange for a fee (the insurance premium). For example, a property insurance company may agree to bear the risk that a particular piece of property (e.g., a car or a house) may suffer a specific type or types of damage or losses during a certain period of time in exchange for a fee from the policyholder who would otherwise be responsible for that damage or loss. That agreement takes the form of an insurance policy. The first insurance company in the United States of america underwrote fire insurance and was formed in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1735.[4] In 1752, Benjamin Franklin helped form a mutual insurance company is known as the Philadelphia Contributionship, which is the nation's oldest insurance carrier still in operation.[5][6] Franklin's company was the first to make contributions toward fire prevention. Not only did his company warn against certain fire hazard, it refused to insure certain building where the risk of fire was too great, such as all wooden homes. In few years the operational definition of insurance presented at the beginning of this article proved inadequate as a result of contracts that had the form but not the substance of insurance. The essence of insurance is the transfer of risk from the insured to one or more insurers. How much risk a contract actually transfers proved to be at the heart of the controversy. This issue arose most clearly in reinsurance, where the uses of Financial Reinsurance to reengineer insurer balance sheets under united states of america GAAP became fashionable during the 1980. The accounting profession raised serious concerns about the use of reinsurance in which little if any actual risks was transferred, and went on to address the issue in FAS 113, cited above. While on its face, FAS 113 is limited to accounting for reinsurance transactions, the guidance it contains is the generally conceded to be equally applicable to US GAAP accounting for insurance transactions executed by commercial institutions.
