Insurance policy

     In insurance, the insurance policy is a contract (generally a standard form contract) between the insurer and the insured, known as the policyholder, which determines the claims which the insurer is legally required to pay. In exchange for an initial payment, known as the premium, the insurer promises to pay for loss caused by perils covered under the policy language.

Insurance contracts are designed to meet specific needs and thus have many features not found in many other types of contracts. Since insurance policies are standard forms, they feature boilerplate language which is similar across a wide variety of different types of insurance policies.

The insurance policy is generally an integrated contract, meaning that it includes all forms associated with the agreement between the insured and insurer.:10 In some cases, however, supplementary writings such as letters sent after the final agreement can make the insurance policy a non-integrated contract.:11 One insurance textbook states that generally "courts consider all prior negotiations or agreements ... every contractual term in the policy at the time of delivery, as well as those written afterwards as policy riders and endorsements ... with both parties' consent, are part of written policy".The textbook also states that the policy must refer to all papers which are part of the policy. Oral agreements are subject to the parol evidence rule, and may not be considered part of the policy if the contract appears to be whole. Advertising materials and circulars are typically not part of a policy Oral contracts pending the issuance of a written policy can occur.

Early insurance contracts tended to be written on the basis of every single type of risk (where risks were defined extremely narrowly), and a separate premium was calculated and charged for each. This structure proved unsustainable in the context of the Second Industrial Revolution, in that a typical large conglomerate might have dozens of types of risks to insure against.

In the 1940s, the insurance industry shifted to the current system where covered risks are initially defined broadly in an insuring agreement on a general policy form (e.g., "We will pay all sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages..."), then narrowed down by subsequent exclusion clauses (e.g., "This insurance does not apply to..."). If the insured desires coverage for a risk taken out by an exclusion on the standard form, the insured can sometimes pay an additional premium for an endorsement to the policy that overrides the exclusion.

Insurers have been criticized in some quarters for the development of complex policies with layers of interactions between coverage clauses, conditions, exclusions, and exceptions to exclusions. In a case interpreting one ancestor of the modern "products-completed operations hazard" clause, the Supreme Court of California complained:

In the United States, property and casualty insurers typically use similar or even identical language in their standard insurance policies, which are drafted by advisory organizations such as the Insurance Services Office and the American Association of Insurance Services.This reduces the regulatory burden for insurers as policy forms must be approved by states; it also allows consumers to more readily compare policies, albeit at the expense of consumer choice.In addition, as policy forms are reviewed by courts, the interpretations become more predictable as courts elaborate upon the interpretation of the same clauses in the same policy forms, rather than different policies from different insurers.

In recent years, however, insurers have increasingly modified the standard forms in company-specific ways or declined to adopt changes to standard forms. For example, a review of home insurance policies found substantial differences in various provisions.In some areas such as directors and officers liability insurance and personal umbrella insurance there is little industry-wide standardization.