The claims jumpers.

• Position: North Carolina's insurance industry - Industry Overview

Despite some setbacks in Raleigh, things are hopping for the insurance industry.

Insurance Commissioner Jim Long offered an interesting footnote when he settled his differences with the state's automobile insurers in 1993, extracting $100 million in refunds and putting to rest years of legal tangles. "This clears all the slates in all the auto cases," he crowed.

Eighteen months later, both sides were back to their old tricks. Long pulled out a new slate when the auto-insurance industry asked for a 10.8% rate hike, and the words he wrote on that figurative blackboard were something to the effect of "fat chance." After he ordered a 13.8% decrease in premiums in September, the N.C. Rate Bureau, which represents the industry, retreated to familiar ground - the state Court of Appeals, which will decide the matter unless there's another settlement.

The renewed enmity between the commissioner and the companies might appear to be a sign of bad times for the state's property and casualty insurers. Far from it. A few squabbles aren't going to wreck their business in North Carolina.

"The general insurance climate in North Carolina is very healthy," says veteran insurance agent Cloyce Anders, who keeps offices in Raleigh and New Bern. "We're still a target state for a lot of insurers looking to do more business."

Indeed, North Carolina figures from A.M. Best Co. for 1993 show improvement: Homeowners' insurance premium revenues, for instance, were up 6%; auto liability, nearly 4%; and general liability, 7.5%.

If the insurers have it so bad, some agents and Department of Insurance officials point out, why do they feel it necessary to give so many customers discounts? "Very seldom is the maximum charged" on homeowners' insurance, Long says. That's why some insurers even admitted that the average 2% increase they were granted in June won't have any real impact on homeowners' premiums. (The Rate Bureau backed off from its request for a 12.7% hike by agreeing to the much smaller increase.)

Of course, not all companies are sharing in the ride. Winston-Salem's Integon Corp., a large player in the specialty market for higher-risk auto coverage, saw operating earnings drop 30% in the first nine months of 1994 from a year earlier. Higher claims losses and more intense competition got most of the blame. But Integon says it expects a rebound in 1995 when results from its acquisition of Bankers and Shippers Insurance Co. of Burlington are counted.

Insurers also got...