The dates for birthdays and anniversaries are clear to us as human beings.
However, trying to decide on one for the organization as we honor ProAssurance’s 50th and got complicated.
Is a company “born” when the entrepreneur has the Eureka! spark of inspiration, or does it at least have to be sketched out on the proverbial bar napkin? If the date is “official,” does it need to tie back to a government body affirmation of your existence, like the date of your business license or a certificate of authority? What if the state approves you Monday but the city or county takes longer? Maybe it’s the date of the first board meeting or some official act after all the red tape is sorted?
If the business is open to the general public, like a retail store or a restaurant, maybe it’s the day the doors were first open for business (never mind last week’s “soft launch” to test the point-of-sale system or the fact that the mayor couldn’t schedule the ribbon cutting photo op until the next week). For professional services, maybe it’s your first sale. Does an insurance company that hasn’t yet sold a single policy really exist?
And those are the easy questions! It gets a lot more complicated once your company starts engaging in mergers and acquisitions. If a firm you acquire was “born” before you, do you get older or do they get younger?
What’s clear for us at ProAssurance is that at some point, indeed at several points over the next 18 months, we will have cause to celebrate our 50th birthday. Therefore, we are declaring 2026 as “Our 50th Year!”
Officially our “birthday” is October 1, 1976 which is the date of incorporation for the Mutual Assurance Society of Alabama now known as ProAssurance Indemnity Company, Inc. The many competing dates that also would have been great choices include February 14, 1977, the date we were licensed by the state of Alabama, and April 15, 1977, the date our first policy became effective.
Once you start contemplating birthday time travel via mergers and acquisitions, ProAssurance may already be 51, or even 76! The ultimate predecessor company to ProNational (part of the merger that formed modern-day ProAssurance) was PICOM which privatized Michigan’s state fund, the Brown McNeeley Insurance Fund. The act that created Brown McNeely was passed in the 1975 legislative session and the fund began issuing coverage on January 1, 1976. But in the 1990’s PICOM bought MEEMIC, an auto insurer, that was incorporated August 10, 1949. That company was sold in 2009, arguably de-aging us by 26 or 27 years. Yes, it can get complicated.
One thing that’s simple for us at ProAssurance is the mission and focus of our last 50 years—and the next 50. Our company, and numerous other medical malpractice insurance companies also celebrating their 50ths, were formed from an insurance crisis in the 1970s. Claims frequency and severity against physicians was rapidly escalating, making commercial insurance either unavailable or unaffordable. In Alabama, a group of visionary physicians partnered with the state medical association to address the crisis by forming a mutual insurance society. This same pattern of mutual formation in partnership with organized medicine was happening in numerous other states in those years.
For the next 50 years, defending the practice of good medicine remained our mission. While the company structure, practices, names, and product offerings adjusted over the years to adapt to market demands, protecting the interests of our insured physicians remained our focus and we’re proud of our accomplishments today.
To all our customers, agents, defense attorneys, employees, medical association partners, and other stakeholders past and present, thank you for a terrific half-century.
The 50th anniversary logo and this announcement launches our 50th anniversary campaign and over the next year we’ll be celebrating key moments from past and those who made them happen. We look forward to sharing those moments here online as we venture into our next 50.