To date, insurers have made more than $2 billion in payments to cover claims relating to the tornados in Joplin.
According to the organization that assembles catastrophe insurance loss predictions, Property Claims Services, the total payouts for the Joplin disaster should pass the $2.2 billion mark.
Insurance Information Institute spokesperson, Robert Hartwig, said that this amount is where the numbers from the payments are headed, and it is what insurers are expecting to have to pay. This includes “actual dollars disbursed, plus the dollars insurers have earmarked or put in reserve for Joplin claims.” That said, insurers aren’t predicting to need to pay much more than that amount.
As of July 15, 2011, there had been 15,656 insurance coverage claims received by the Missouri Department of Insurance, which were related to policies for commercial property or auto, or private homes or auto, as well as other categories. The department stated that insurers had, by that time, made $745.3 million in payments into those claims, but that there were still almost 1,300 more claims that had yet to be resolved.
Of the payments that had been made, over $404 million had been made to homeowners who had made approximately 7,600 claims. In the category of homeowners insurance, it is forecasted that there will be a total of 8,285 claims made. Over $289 million had been directed toward the 1,902 commercial property claims. The prediction for that category is that there will be 2,049 claims in total.
Director of the department, John Huff, praised the work of the insurance industry following the catastrophe, and said that the fact that $745 million had already been paid into claims within a span of 8 weeks was a “significant investment into the local economy”.
