Prevention through Design (PtD) from the insurance perspective.

Thank you to Rick Rinehart, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), for hosting what we believe to be a very important opportunity for us all to become involved in a seminal event in safety. I want to take a few minutes to give you some insight into an insurance company's perspective on the fundamental value of safety or prevention through design (PtD). Of course, we all know that insurance is about risk transfer. It is the foundation we depend upon to feel secure that events will not terribly undermine the security of our families, homes, and businesses. When someone is injured, at home or at work, the initial cost of treatment and indemnification is borne by insurance companies. The insurance products are the vehicle by which our economy spreads business and injury risk across the society. Insurance companies are essentially the stewards of our policyholders' pooled money. In this society, what we hold as one of our highest values is the health and well being of not only the people closest to us, but also the public as a whole. In many ways we expect businesses and our government to protect us from the products we use. Insurance companies recognized many years ago – decades before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or NIOSH − that the designs of buildings, machinery, tools, and production processes were root causes of injuries and illnesses. Many property, product, and industrial safety initiatives were developed by insurance industry supported organizations, such as Underwriters' Laboratories, the American Society of Safety Engineers, the American National Standards Institute, and the National Fire Protection Association. In fact, early machine guard designs, in use to this day, came from work done by Liberty Mutual Engineers in the 1940s and 50s. You may not be aware of this, but Liberty Mutual safety engineers built a prototype safety car in the 1950s, with seat belts and padded dashboards and dozens of other innovative safety devices, long before Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed.