Sadly there is not much substance to the article, just a list of rumours and industry gossip. I would be much more interested in the industry wisdom around these insurances. I can imagine two legitimate business reasons for them and a PR one.<p>A legitimate business reason is insuring a touring act against some catastrophy which prevents the performer from performing. I imagine there are a lot of fixed costs in a touring show which need to be paid even if the star suddenly develops tonsilitis, or gets food poisoning. In turn i would imagine that if the performer is a no-show the show doesn’t get paid anything. And it is not like you can send in Taylor’s understudy or something. So you have a very expensive, single point of failure in your business plan with no redundancy. It makes sense to insure the business against that. In this usecase i would be curious how extensive the vetting is? Do they perform a full medical on the star? Do they review the coreography to see how strenous it is, or the schedule to see if the star will have enough time to recuperate between shows? Can the show management offer risk mitigation measures to lower the premiums? (For example if they have a touring physio on staff would that make the insurance cheaper?)<p>An other legitimate busines case would be the star insuring themselves. For example if they plan to buy something expensive (a yacht, or a palace) which they can afford if their fortunes keep up. But they might be in a bad place financially if something happens with their body which makes them unable to perform. Then they are stuck with the expensive thing and they can’t maintain it financially any more. So they take out a policy on their continued ability to perform. Here i would be curious how the moral risk is handled by the policy? What if the star insures their voice but then has a mental breakdown, doesn’t want to perform anymore and wants to cash the insurance out. With something as subjective as a voice i would imagine psychosomatic effects can influence it greatly. How is this handled by the policy?<p>Then there is the third usecase, which is pure PR. Talking about how much some body part of yours is insured for feels more classy and legitimate than saying out loud “look at my ass, isn’t it just so sexy?”. And for that you don’t really need a strong policy. In fact if you want to minimise your costs while still maintaining the bragging rights you can just make the policy very narrow. For example an insurance policy which pays out a million dollar if anything bad happens with any of your legs in the next ten years will surelly cost a lot. While a much narrower one which only pays out the million dollar if you suffer a leg injury resulting in the amputation of both of your legs during a specific red carpet walk for a specific premier would cost a lot less. While both policy can be truthfully described as “my legs are insured for a million dollar”. Do managers/stars optimise this way? Or is it just easier to lie for publicity? Not as if an outsider can verify what insurance you really have.