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If a stealthy new choice about the revised common home owners insurance kind catches on, it could before long set you back extra to keep up your home's physical appearance.

If a stealthy new choice about the revised common home owners insurance kind catches on, it could before long set you back extra to keep up your home's physical appearance.

As Insurance Journal described last week, a revised property owners insurance form was filed for most states in February because of the American Affiliation of Insurance Services, or AAIS, just one of two organizations that design standardized varieties and policies for that assets and casualty, or P&C, industry.

The revised variety includes a new "cosmetic damage exclusion" option that would excuse your home insurer from paying to repair cosmetic wind and hail damage to your roof, walls, doors and windows. The variety also allows insurers to limit the exclusion to a single part of the dwelling, such as the roof.

Insurance policies containing the exclusion would still pay to repair functional physical damage to the insured household, i.e., its ability to keep the weather outside.

The other P&C standards organization, ISO, also wrote a cosmetic damage exclusion into its recently revised normal commercial insurance type and is considering adding it to its new householders insurance form as well.

AAIS spokesman Joseph Harrington says the 330 insurance companies that use AAIS sorts requested the change as a tool to help manage a recent increase in cosmetic damage claims. While some insurers may well choose to apply the exclusion on a policy-by-policy basis, Harrington expects most will either apply it across the board or not use it at all.

About the surface (so to speak), the cosmetic damage exclusion seems like an ill-timed nickel-and-diming by residence insurers whose pleas for rate increases have lately fallen on deaf ears at state insurance departments.

Why, a homeowner might well wonder, should I submit to a sketchy bit of hair-splitting that gives my insurance company discretion on what constitutes cosmetic damage, especially in traditionally hard-hit geographic areas like the Midwest, where this shell game is likely to be popular? And how might this potential blight affect our already-struggling home values?

Many household insurers no doubt hope that this alternative will become the new norm. But once home owners get wind of it, there's a fair chance it may backfire and simply drive business to the agencies that refuse to use it.

Would you buy a policy from an insurer who couldn't care less what your home looks like?

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