Insurance ratings group throws up its hands

By Geert De Lombaerde Posted on August 27, 2009 at 10:56 am

Saying the industry is simply in too much flux right now, A.M. Best, one of the most established insurance ratings agencies, has withdrawn a host of company ratings based only on publicly available data. Among the companies who are now ‘not formally followed’ are affiliates of HealthSpring as well as BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee and Ardent Health Services’ Lovelace Health Plan.

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Tags: A.M. Best Co., debt ratings, financial reports, health insurance  

Guv candidate: Local AIG group lost $1B

By Geert De Lombaerde Posted on April 12, 2009 at 10:56 pm

Ward Cammack knows this because he and a partner looked at buying American General’s Brentwood division. But the losses sustained due to an asset-lending program designed to goose returns ended that conversation.

From a Cammack blog post:

Maybe AIG should have voluntarily disclosed the details of how the collateral from the asset lending program was invested. The fact that the AIG Tennessee subsidiary was involved in asset lending was artfully hidden in a two-page note to their financial statements. Contrast that to the required disclosure of their invested assets. Each asset is individually detailed in their annual statement, so that policy holders, investors, regulators, and employees can know exactly what the risks are from those investments.

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Tags: American International Group Inc., bailout, financial regulation, financial reports, insurance, investment management, politics, state government, William 'Ward' Cammack Jr.  

Browsing AmSurg’s 10-K

By Geert De Lombaerde Posted on February 26, 2009 at 9:56 pm

A few quick notes from the annual report filed Thursday by surgery center operator AmSurg:

- The company has acquired three surgery centers (but announced none of them) for a total of $16.5 million. Company execs, who snapped up 40 centers in ‘07 and ‘08, have said in recent months that they see opportunities in a market with far fewer potential buyers.

- The company’s buyback program has spent $12.4 million of the $25 million allotted to it in September and offset the impact of all 2008 stock option exercises. The average price of the shares bought back (Ticker: AMSG) was $24, 60 percent above Thursday’s close.

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Tags: acquisitions, AmSurg Corp., financial reports, outpatient surgery centers, stock buybacks  

Extensibly Speaking

By Kleinheider Posted on December 17, 2008 at 2:03 pm

The SEC will require large public companies to file their financial reports using technology making it easier for investors to read and analyze their data:

The SEC voted 4-1 to require 500 of the largest public companies to begin filing financial reports using the technology known as XBRL, or extensible business reporting language, by mid-2009.

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Tags: financial reports, reporting, SEC