Gone, But Not Forgotten! the Remnants of ELNY

Peter Bickford’s Insight Column in the September 9th issue of the Insurance Advocate is an eloquent post mortem for the Executive Life Insurance Company  of New York, the death of which took a long, arduous twenty-two years and left many injured people to drown in its wake.  While New York seems content to sweep ELNY out of state, out of mind and under the rug forever, the impact of this botched rehabilitation and fundamentally flawed liquidation will simply not go away for the victims, some of whom lost as much as 70% of their “guaranteed” payments after suffering catastrophic injuries or the loss of a loved one. The ELNY debacle is a disgrace for the insurance industry and for the Department of Financial Services, its predecessors and agents, especially the New York Liquidation Bureau.  We can only hope that Mr. Bickford’s call for reform of the insurance insolvency process does not fall on deaf ears.