Understanding How Experience Rating Works
Understanding How Experience Rating Works
Many people wonder why it is necessary to use experience rating to predict future losses if workers' compensation rates are designed for this purpose. Experience rating can benefit employers. The prospects of both bad credits and debits are implicit in the majority of risk-specific programs dealing with experience rating. Since it gives an employer some influence in how much the final premium will be, this gives an incentive for them to develop their loss prevention strategies. It is also good for them to form incentives that encourage injured employees to return to work as soon as they are able. When this happens, experience rating can be beneficial to employers by increasing occupational safety and health.
Experience rating shows a refinement in processes of premium determination. It creates a net premium cost for employers, which means their costs will be appropriate for the provided coverage. Experience rating shares or spreads the cost of a loss with all group members who are likely to go through similar losses. Although the probability and cost of injuries for an entire group as a whole may not be accurately predictable, it is not possible to decide which member of the group will ultimately be responsible for costs.
This is why there is insurance. If it were possible or easy to predict, group members who do not experience loss would not have any incentive to purchase coverage. Meanwhile, the premium charge for members experiencing losses would need to include the loss costs. Serious injuries to individuals are usually rare, but the totals can be minor amounts or reach well into the millions. For workers' compensation, the easiest rating method is manual rating. With this system, employers are categorized according to business classifications or operations. Group losses are estimated and then added as an average.
Employers are assigned to specific classifications to make sure the rates they receive are reflective of the costs all similar employers have. While each classification comes with similar risks, individual ones are different in some ways. However, experience rating is designed to reflect individual differences. Insurance providers would be able to look for employers with lower costs and avoid ones with higher costs if the rating system were only manual. The system needs to be refined to avoid such a scenario, and experience rating falls under that category.
With workers' compensation experience rating, individual employers' loss and payroll data are analyzed over time. The most recent three years of data is reviewed against similar groups' risks to determine the experience modification. An employer that has better experience ratings will be given credits, but those with less will be given debit ratings.