Insurance attorney Peter Lencsis provides a unique, objective description of the insurance regulatory system as it exists today in the United States. Concise but comprehensive, it provides an easily grasped, immediately useful explanation of how the regulatory system works. Because of the federal McCarran-Ferguson Act, most insurance regulation is left to the individual states, and is thus non-uniform. But there is still a common pattern to state regulation, explains Lencsis, due in large part to the activities of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and its own uniform standards. Lencsis covers the formation and licensing of insurance companies and the regulation of their underwriting and investment activities, as well as the insurance insolvency laws and guaranty funds, assigned risk plans, reinsurance, holding companies, and the regulation of agents and brokers. An important resource for insurance industry professionals, and others in regulatory agencies of the public sector.

For human resource professionals, labor law specialists, and others involved in the practice of labor-management relations, Lencsis provides a concise, easily-accessed description of the workers compensation system in the United States, its governing laws and also its insurance aspects. Covering all major facets of workers compensation legislation and the insurance and risk management techniques used to comply with them, his book will have equal benefits for the staffs of insurance companies and brokerages, compensation and claims professionals, and for workers compensation executives in governmental agencies.

Lencsis explains that workers compensation laws were enacted on the federal and state levels in the early part of the century and have endured in the same basic form to the present. They represent a radical departure from common law concepts of negligence and damages in that they provide for statutory medical and wage-loss benefits regardless of who is at fault. Lencsis explores how insurance mechanisms in the public and private sectors are used to fund benefits and to make their delivery as secure and certain as possible. He also notes that workers compensation insurance is a major part of the property-casualty insurance business, and as such has recently become one of its most profitable areas. Lencsis' book helps readers to understand these concepts and to work with them in the day-to-day conduct of their business.