ABSTRACT
The insurance crisis is here, and it is striking hardest at service industries and organizations which have contact with large numbers of people. Hotels, restaurants, hospitals, transit systems, retailers, city governments-these are some of the businesses that are seeing premiums increase four and five times for coverage decreases of up to 90 per cent. Museums, despite their lack of clear hazards, are thrown into the same category by underwriters who see only large numbers of people and their propensity to slip and fall. In the present era of conservative underwriting, even museums with good safety records are subject to large premium increases, penalized by an environment in which the public is increasingly likely to sue the owners of the property on which they sustain life’s inevitable minor accidents.
