John Barnidge: Appreciate the answer. That was very helpful. In the script, you talked about new business growth greatest in states where you had the greatest confidence in price adequacy. Can you maybe give some examples of states where that is the true the where that is the case? And then inversely, some states where greatest price adequacy is needed. Appreciate that.
Marita Zuraitis: Yes. Thanks, John. I can turn it over to Mark in a minute. But you can imagine when you are in almost all the states as we are, it is a — it’s a lot of work to look at your rate adequacy by state. We have an excellent actuarial team that does this work on a daily, weekly, monthly, maybe even hourly basis. And we have a strong drill as it relates to the rate that we need the product restrictions, unfortunately, that we may have to put in place. And I think you said it well, we do this on a state by state basis. But I’ll turn it over to Mark to provide a little specificity there.
Mark Desrochers: Sure. Thanks, Marita. And thanks, John, for the question. Yes, I think when we look at our current — in current environment, and what we are looking at from last cost moving forward, and our rate need that, by the time we get to the early mid part of next year, we have a view that most of our states are going to be rate adequate at that point in time. And so when we talk about, are we comfortable riding business, because we had that line of sight towards rate adequacy, it doesn’t necessarily mean today, but as we look at the rate, we believe we can get over the next quarter or two, do we get ourselves in line? And I think when we look at that time horizon that in most places we’re going to get there, the couple of places that remain concerns for us might be like Georgia, where there’s some regulatory limitations on how much rate we might be able to get at once.
And then always, California is in the back of our mind in terms of, will we get really adequate there, given some of the challenges with the regulatory environment. What I would say is, California specifically, as you know, we have an outstanding property filing that we submitted in June and an auto filing in late July, both in the 20% to 25% range, and we’ve had extremely constructive discussions with the department, the property filing was in first. And we actually think we’re within the next several weeks at a point of reaching resolution with that, and that we’re hopeful, soon after that, that we’ll be able to work through the auto filing. So if we can, you know, make some headway there, then I think, as we get to the earlier middle part of next year, we’re going to feel pretty good about our rate adequacy and our ability to write through business.
Marita Zuraitis: Yes, thanks, Mark. Mark mentioned in a meeting recently that he and Steve and I had, I won’t say the number but many years doing this in the P&C space. And I would dare say that this is probably the most dynamic environment that we’ve seen. And I think that requires good actuarial science, but it also requires flexibility. So when we talk about our rate plans for 2024, and how much we think we will push, it is based on current data, and we have to remain flexible in that. And all I know is looking at these all the time, if rate trends continue to mitigate, then maybe you take less, if they get worse than certainly you take more, I think we have the added flexibility of our third-party strategy. We’ve also talked about this not being as robust in a harder market, but we certainly have a stable of really good third-party partner carriers, when in a specific state, potentially because of scale, or in a particular environment or circumstance.
We’ve got good third party carriers that we can use, and still maintain that P&C relationship with our educator, and we use those in a dynamic way. So appreciate the question.
