Christopher Boggs didn’t enter the insurance world because of some great calling. In his own words, “nothing interested me about the insurance business.” He was a journalism major who stumbled into insurance by way of a writing job at ISO. But here’s the twist in his life journey. He fell in love with it. Boggs discovered what few people ever do: that insurance, when properly understood, is a language of risk, responsibility, and promise. Chris Boggs has been translating that language for the rest of us ever since.
During our recent Claim Game Podcast, I asked Chris what keeps him going after three decades of teaching coverage. His simple answer was that insurance still fascinates him. He loves policy wording. He loves the logic behind it. He even joked that his wife tells people he “salivates over insurance.” But his passion isn’t for the bureaucracy of insurance. Instead, it’s for its potential to work fairly when professionals actually understand what they’re doing. That’s where his criticism of the modern industry hits hardest.
Boggs says we’ve stopped teaching people how to read insurance policies. He calls training the “forgotten art” of our profession. His view is that insurance companies cut back on it because it takes time and money. The result is exactly what you’d expect—misinterpreted coverage, bad claims decisions, and policyholders who lose trust in the system. He pointed out something few are willing to admit. He stated that many improper claim denials come not from malice, but ignorance. People simply don’t know how to read what’s in front of them.
His “Twelve Rules for Reading an Insurance Policy” are famous. The first one seems embarrassingly basic and obvious: make sure the named insured is correct. Yet Boggs says it’s violated constantly. He shared stories of agents insuring the wrong entity, resulting in complete denials because the policy didn’t actually cover the party suffering the loss. That’s not a gray area. I suggest that’s insurance agent negligence masquerading as routine. Boggs’ point is that you can’t interpret a contract you never learned to read.
We also talked about ordinance and law coverage. Boggs calls it “the silent coverage killer.” Too many agents, he said, never explain to clients that standard property policies won’t pay to rebuild portions of a structure required by updated building codes. “Just ask them one question,” he said. “Your policy won’t pay to rebuild if building codes are triggered. Are you okay with that?” He’s right. Nobody is. Yet, thousands of property owners don’t find that out until after disaster strikes.
Then there’s the issue of context. Boggs reminded us that most disputes over policy language boil down to words pulled out of context. “If two reasonable interpretations exist,” he said, “ambiguity goes in favor of the insured.” That’s contract law 101, but you wouldn’t know it from how often insurers and adjusters ignore it. Courts have long held that unclear policy wording must be construed against the insurance company that drafted it. Yet the fight over “what the policy really means” never ends because people keep reading sentences instead of contracts.
Chris’s career took him full circle. He started with the Insurance Services Office (ISO, then as an educator, then back to the ISO as a commercial policy drafter, and now to an independent educator and consultant. He left ISO because, ironically, even though he helped write the policy language, he wasn’t allowed to interpret it. “You wrote this,” people would say, “what does it mean?” And ISO’s official position was: We can’t tell you. That’s absurd. Writing policies that no one is allowed to explain captures exactly what’s wrong with modern insurance. The industry has become so defensive about interpretation that it’s forgotten its duty to clarity.
When I finished our conversation, I realized that Christopher Boggs is that rare voice calling the entire profession back to basics. He’s not preaching policyholder advocacy or carrier loyalty. Instead, he’s preaching literacy. Read the policy. Teach the language. Understand what you sell, what you underwrite, and what you pay or deny.
I don’t want to overstate, but I suggest that Boggs’ interview should be watched as a moral call to everyone in the insurance industry. Because when we stop reading carefully and learning about how the insurance product is supposed to work, we stop honoring the promise insurance was built on and the public relies upon.
Here is a link to the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKdGZLHsolo
Thought For The Day
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
—George Bernard Shaw