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The insurance adjuster’s role had been greatly diminished. During her father’s time, setting a value for a claim had been a skill. Under Allstate’s new system, the computer would spit out an estimate. This was Colossus, a program that analyzed hundreds of different injuries entered by adjusters lik…

The surge in Allstate’s share price was accompanied by a dramatic fall in the “pure loss ratio,” the measure of claims payouts divided by premium income, before factoring in operating costs. In 1987, Allstate paid out 70.9 cents in claims for every dollar it took in. By 1997, two full years into th…

By the 1990s, with McKinsey-led financialization sweeping the economy and ever-increasing pressure from activist shareholders for companies to boost profits, the firm pushed a big new idea to its clients: reducing the amount paid out in claims. In McKinsey-speak: “After years of squeezing the cost …

In one slide, McKinsey told Allstate to try to settle 90 percent of its claims as quickly and as cheaply as possible. For the other 10 percent, policyholders or third-party claimants who didn’t take the Allstate offer or, even worse, hired a lawyer, the “boxing gloves” treatment was in order. They …

OxyContin first sank its teeth into the poorer communities. “From a sales perspective, OxyContin had its greatest early success in rural, small town America—already full of shuttered factories and Dollar General stores,” Beth Macy wrote in Dopesick, her powerful account of opioid addiction and abus…