Talk:Co-insurance

underreporting penalty

A building valued at $1,000,000 has an 80% coinsurance clause but is insured for only $750,000. It suffers a $200,000 loss. The insured would recover $750,000 ÷ (.80 × 1,000,000) × 200,000 = $187,500 (less any deductible).

In this example the underreporting penalty would be $12,500.

So, if the building is insured for 900 thousand dollars: $900 000 ÷ (.80 × 1 000 000) × 200 000 = $225 000, more than the loss. This can't be right - should explain how these cases are handled—Random832 20:48, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Good question. The coinsurance penalty doesn't "kick in" unless the building's insured value was *less* than its actual value by more than the coinsurance percentage. In your example, since $900,000/$1,000,000 > 80%, the coinsurance penalty formula isn't used to calculate the reimbursement. Lawyer2b (talk) 16:12, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

So then they simply reimburse the whole loss in that case, and there is no penalty at all for underreporting? I assume, though, that a total loss would only be reimbursed for the insured value ($900k) rather than the actual value ($1000k) in that case, correct? --Random832 (contribs) 17:05, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I believe both your surmises are correct.  :-) Lawyer2b (talk) 20:00, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

The 80% or the 20% is the level of coinsurance?

I understand that coinsurance refers to the fact that part of the insurance is provided by the owner. Can you say that a policy has a low coinsurance level if the percentage covered by the owner is low?Koczy (talk) 09:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Move back to "Coinsurance"

The article was recently renamed to "Co-insurance" by Triskelios (talk · contribs). I don't agree with this change and there was no consensus for it. Please move it back. Note that the hyphen was only added to the lead recently [1] - the article has a long history of no hyphen, as well it should given that the lack of the hyphen is much more common, and saves everyone from hitting an extra key. II | (t - c) 07:41, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Requested move 3 January 2020

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus that coinsurance is prevalent enough in sources. Someday maybe it will go the way of email, but there's no consensus here that we've reached that day yet. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 18:30, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

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Co-insurance → Coinsurance – I have seen both "coinsurance" and "co-insurance" in practice, but believe the former is more common in today's parlance. Google searches confirm this, with "coinsurance" getting 5.0 millon results and "co-insurance" getting only 1.8 millon. Therefore, per WP:COMMONNAME, I agree with ImperfectlyInformed's 2010 request that the move by Triskelios be reversed. See also, Wiktionary's entry. – voidxor 04:55, 3 January 2020 (UTC) —Relisting. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 14:05, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

• Support - per Google Ngrams comparison, this appears to be the common spelling. This appears to have been an undiscussed move in 2010 away from "coinsurance", so this RM will correct that. -- Netoholic @ 07:36, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
• Support Agreed. II | (t - c) 09:38, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
• Oppose per WP:RECOGNIZABLE. This is much easier to parse with the hyphen. WP should not be fully compounding things in semi-novel ways (especially ones that produce ambiguous-looking output that seems to refer to coins) in any cases in which the reliable sources are not in near uniformity on the matter. WP:COMMONNAME is not a style policy and has nothing to do with questions like this. It's a MOS:HYPHEN matter. That guideline does not absolutely require a hyphen here, but four pieces of advice it offers on when to use one are clearly applicable, some of them so obviously that it's hard to believe anyone would miss them: "A hyphen may be used to distinguish between homographs ... Hyphenation clarifies when ... a word is uncommon (co-proposed, re-target) or may be misread (sub-era, not subera). ... Hyphens can help with ease of reading (face-to-face discussion, hard-boiled egg) and are particularly useful in long noun phrases .... A hyphen can help to disambiguate".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:09, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

  Indeed, I see how somebody unfamiliar with the word might parse "coins" as the root. That said, I disagree with three of your other points. First, WP:COMMONSTYLE is cautioning against the use of colloquial, improper English grammar. I see "coinsurance" as a word which has already become compound over time, like how "co-ordinate" eventually became "coordinate" (Ngram). Taken that way, this isn't a grammatical issue. Second, "coinsurance" is not nearly as uncommon as "coproposed" and "retarget" (Ngram, which isn't even finding "coproposed" in books). Third, "face-to-face discussion" and "hard-boiled egg" are compound adjectives, not alternate spellings, so that is a different situation. – voidxor 20:49, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

  Then you need to re-read COMMONSTYLE. It is about trying to impose a style (typically an expedient one, and most often news style) simply because it is somewhat more frequent than another style that is objectively clearer for our readers. Given that the entire purpose of an article like this is to present a topic for the edification of readers unfamiliar with it, then "I see how somebody unfamiliar with the word might parse "coins" as the root" is sufficient cause to retain the hyphen. And there are others, raised below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

  You've got that backwards, SMcCandlish. It is style guidelines which are irrelevant to WP:ARTICLETITLES policy. What you're proposing is prescriptionist, and that's not something we do. -- Netoholic @ 02:26, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  I've said nothing prescriptivist ["prescriptionist" isn't a word] whatsoever about language here (though of course everyone arguing one way or the other on any case like this is making a "prescription" for what WP should do in such a case; that's not what linguistic prescriptivism refers to). It's pure linguistic description that over-compounding in cases like this produces reading comprehension difficulties, and that English retains a lot of hyphenation. English mostly drops hyphens only a) when a term is not confusing to anyone when fully compounded due to familiarity and/or structure of the term, or b) in styles of writing that are hostile to hyphenation at all regardless of the costs of taking that position. Major style guides have entire sections on hyphenation and when to use it, and they recommend using it in cases where confusion or ambiguity could result (a case like this one). In the rare instance that an off-site style guide uses internal ideas about what it considers "consistent" and "concise" to move to eliminate all useful hyphenation as a rule change, the pushback is immediate and strong. E.g., the AP Stylebook (the style guide most frequently used by US news publishers and in marketing writing) recently reversed itself after such a move resulted in sharp criticism from readers, those using other style guides, and even American journalists who usually follow AP Stylebook without question [2]. I have no idea why you're trying to make some kind of "policy I like [but misinterpret] versus a guideline you like" bogus argument about "authority levels". WP simply does not have or tolerate the existence of WP:P&G conflicts of that sort. If you think you see one, you are in error in interpreting the P&G pages in question. WP:AT is not a style policy, never has been, and never will be one. It has nothing whatsoever to do with hyphens, dashes, capital letters, and other such matters, for which it (and its naming conventions sub-guidelines) defer to MoS. It is the policy that tells us the name of this topic for our purposes (i.e. WP:COMMONNAME and the WP:CRITERIA) is some version of co[-]insurance, styled with or without the hyphen, versus a completely different name, such as mutual insurance. You're just sorely confused if you think that MoS isn't valid to cite at RM simply because titles are involved. It is actually cited far more frequently than various naming conventions pages. Whether to use a hyphen (or impose any other style matter) in a particular case comes down to an examination of what's best for our readers (and MoS already does most of that for us, even if it leave few gray areas like optional hyphenation in cases like this). In any case where RS on a topic use the same style with near-uniformity, then (also per MoS itself, not AT), then WP will do likewise, even if it doesn't agree with MoS's default recommendation. In this case, though, sources clearly are not in lock-step about how to write this word, and frequently do hyphenate it. Even our own text isn't consistent on the matter, where different editors have drawn on different source material but not normalized the spelling (MOS:ARTCON).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose—yeah, I think I agree with SMcCandlish on this one. Tony (talk) 23:41, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
• Support I have to go with the nom on this one. Otherwise, we would have to move copayment. It's a consistency issue._{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 01:16, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

  That's a slippery slope and red herring fallacy. See any major style guide, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, New Hart's Rules, Garner's Modern English, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English, etc. Whether to hyphenate is a case-by-case matter. Compounding in English (as in most other languages) is a highly differential process that pertains separately to different expressions with different origins, primary audiences, ages of the term in the language, and forms they take. In particular, it is much more common to hyphenate between two adjacent vowels from different morphemes (as is the case here) than it would be otherwise, to prevent misreading it as a diphthong. (Similarly, it is also more common to hyphenate between two of the same consonant being juxtaposed by different morphemes). So, the case to hyphenate co-insurance is much stronger than the case to do so with copayment (though hyphenating that would also be fine, as it is written co-payment in many sources). But moving one on the merits of its own understandability examination does not impose an obligation to move another, dissimilar one. WP:CONSISTENT can only be applied to cases that are in fact consistent in their nature, which isn't the case here. If you don't believe me, all you have to go do so look at ther superficially parallel cases, e.g. Email and E-commerce. See also the frequency with which anti- is a hyphenated prefix in our article titles [3], which is almost always when it is tacked on as modifier to form a novel compound, but not when it's an integral part of a unitary word like antihistamine. Many other examples like this.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:27, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

• Oppose per SMcC. As noted, the decision on hyphenation is case-by-case, and this one would seem to be better served hyphenated.  — Amakuru (talk) 12:54, 27 January 2020 (UTC)