• The very nature of insurance significantly reduces the potential of a run-on-the-bank scenario for property/casualty, health and most life insurance products.
• For those limited products sold by insurers that could be subject to some level of run risk, mitigating factors exist such as policy loan limitations, surrender/withdrawal penalties, and additional taxes.
• Additionally, insurers typically maintain a diverse product mix so only a portion of the company’s products would be subject to the already reduced level of run risk.
• Importantly, insurance products unlike other financial products, do not transform short term liabilities into longer term assets.
• Insurance has shorter duration liabilities in many of the property/casualty and health product lines, and the assets held are similarly short term.
• Insurance has longer duration liabilities in life and annuity product lines, and these liabilities are matched against similarly longer term assets.
• To be clear, though, the business of life insurance, in and of
  itself, does not pose systemic risk to the broader economy or the U.S. financial system.

--  Kevin M. McCarty - NAIC Testimony- Commissioner, Florida Office of Insurance Regulation and President of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners

2012 1129 - GOV - Examining the Impact of the Proposed Rules To Implement Basel III Capital Standards 

• [PDF - 439p, 
• Committee on Financial Services - Joint Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit and the Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity