oh I don't doubt thor that the insurance industry was writing the rules for crop ins. with such a captive clientele such as us farmers, it probably took a fair amount of imagination to make it look like some semblance that the various companies were competing against each other.   your explanation does fill some gaps in my understanding of some things that were going on.
I do know my insurance provider shared with me (still in the 90's) some of the funds he was sharing in from the years with negligible claims.    they were pretty good sized numbers for the times.      and as far as cheating or what not, I do know that a claim was as likely to be overpaid as underpaid, due to incompetence of some of the hires they had to do the measuring, and paper work.      I myself held a check in excess of 20k of what I had coming due to poor math skills of the guy doing the measuring, even though the bin measurements were spot on.      that was a tough one to swallow and take back.