Florida-based King Risk Partners has continued its expansion in New England with the acquisition of Perry Insurance Agency of North Andover, Massachusetts.
Perry Insurance Agency is an independent insurance agency that offers personal insurance, commercial insurance, and liability coverage options.
Owners Darryl Perry and Marc Perry said that partnering with King Risk Partners gives them access to expanded resources and broader capabilities.
Scott Popilek, chief executive officer of King Risk Partners, said the deal supports King’s continued expansion i the region. King Risk Partners has more than 50 locations on the Eastern seaboard from New Hampshire to Florida, including six in Massachusetts, six in Connecticut, two in New Hampshire and one in Rhode Island. Within the past year, its acquisitions have included The Roberts Agency in Bloomfield, Connecticut; New England Property & Casualty in Wallingford, Connecticut; and Acacia Insurance in Waltham, Massachusetts.
The four most recent cases of the New World screwworm have been confirmed on the same Texas property, marking the largest cluster of detections to be reported since the parasite was found in the US earlier this month.
Three cattle and one goat were detected to have screwworm in Terrell County, which is adjacent to Mexico, according to the US Department of Agriculture. All were from a single premises, the Texas Animal Health Commission said in a Wednesday email.
That brings the total number of cases in the U.S. to 19 since early June when the screwworm was originally detected in a calf in Zavala County, Texas. The outbreak is the first in the US in a decade and the first in livestock in about 50 years, threatening the nation’s largest cattle state at a time when the country’s herd has already shrunk.
The screwworm is a fly whose larvae burrow into the wounds of warm-blooded animals, and it usually spreads via the movement of infested animals. Infestations are treatable but can cause death if undetected. The screwworm poses no threat to the safety of the U.S. food supply.
Epidemiological investigations have not yet been completed on the Terrell County cases, but tracebacks are currently underway to determine how the infestations occurred, the commission said. There is currently a quarantine in parts of more than a dozen Texas counties, according to the commission.
Later in the session, a media representative asked another panelist, Jim Williamson, president and CEO of Everest Group, Ltd., if there’s an end in sight to increasing litigation settlements and jury awards.
“How does this end? How can the industry tackle its problem?”
Referencing Farney’s comments, Williamson said the state-by-system in the United States provides “a laboratory of different outcomes based on different inputs,” pointing to Florida as a state adopting thoughtful, economically sensible policies and getting the problems under control.
Within the insurance industry on the commercial liability insurance side, Williamson and Fairfax Insurance Group President Brian Young discussed individual underwriter moves to compress limits in recent years in response to the pressures of increased claims severity. For the industry as a whole, however, “that’s made us more vulnerable to social inflation because everybody’s capitulating,” Williamson suggested, going on to specifically describe situations where excess insurers force resolution of claims in lower layers when case facts don’t warrant those actions. “I’ve withdrawn the authority for my team to hammer people underneath us,” he said. “I need to make those decisions because that’s not necessarily the right behavior for us as an industry to manage these claims.”
