Illinois Annuity Guaranty Coverage: What the Receivership Record Shows

ILHIGA’s current activation list names ten insolvent insurers, each with a liquidation date: Executive Life (California, December 6, 1991), Executive Life of New York (August 8, 2013), Illinois Healthcare Insurance Company (Illinois, June 30, 2000), Land of Lincoln Mutual Health (Illinois, October 1, 2016), Life & Health Insurance Company of America (Pennsylvania, July 2, 2004), Lincoln Memorial Life (Texas, September 22, 2008), National States (Missouri, November 15, 2010), Oak Casualty (Illinois, November 19, 2002), Penn Treaty Network America (Pennsylvania, March 1, 2017), and SeeChange Health (California, January 28, 2015). Count the domiciles and seven of the ten failed companies were based outside Illinois — the guaranty system follows the policyholder’s residence, not the insurer’s headquarters, and the list shows it. The association adds its own caveat, which this page repeats: the list “does not include every insolvent insurer that has affected Illinois policyholders” (ilhiga.org, same page and date).

Illinois-domiciled receiverships run through the Office of the Special Deputy Receiver, which currently administers twelve open estates (osdchi.com, Open Company Menu, read August 15, 2026). One of them is a life insurer. Columbian Life Insurance Company entered confidential conservation before the Circuit Court of Cook County on October 26, 2023, and was placed in rehabilitation on July 29, 2024, under case number 2023 CH 09034, with Director of Insurance Ann Gillespie as court-affirmed Rehabilitator — all per OSD’s page for the estate, read the same day. The company stopped issuing new policies on May 31, 2024, by order of the Conservator, but continues servicing in-force business, collecting premiums, and paying claims, according to the same OSD page.

Notice what has not happened. Columbian Life does not appear on ILHIGA’s activation list, and that absence is the system working as written: coverage is determined at the point a member insurer “is found to be insolvent and ordered liquidated by a court,” in the FAQ’s words (ilhiga.org/FAQ, August 15, 2026). Rehabilitation is the stage before that trigger. OSD states the Rehabilitator will evaluate a solvent run-off and “begin advance coordination with affected state insurance guaranty associations in the event that a liquidation should become necessary in the future” — the guaranty net positioning itself behind a company that may never fall into it.

The Illinois statute puts the annuity number at “$250,000 in the present value of annuity benefits, including net cash surrender and net cash withdrawal values” — 215 ILCS 5/531.03(3)(b)(i)(C), text as published on ilga.gov (source note P.A. 100-687, effective August 3, 2018). ILHIGA’s own consumer pages state it as “$250,000 in withdrawal and cash values” for annuities. Both figures are the same dollar amount; the statute’s present-value framing is the one that controls, and the association says so itself: “The applicable state guaranty association statute is the controlling authority, regardless of any information presented on this site.”

The roof over everything is $300,000 per individual, regardless of how many policies or contracts you hold with the failed insurer, except health benefit plans, which carry a $500,000 maximum — stated on both ILHIGA’s Policyholder Protection page and in §531.03(3)(b). The same subsection produces a contrast worth knowing: Illinois protects only $100,000 of life insurance cash surrender value, versus $250,000 of annuity value. The cash sitting inside a whole life policy and the cash sitting inside a deferred annuity are not equally guaranteed here. NOLHGA’s fifty-one-jurisdiction table, current to June 1, 2025 (nolhga.com), shows Illinois at the same $250,000 annuity figure.

ILHIGA determines residency “on the date the insurer is determined to be impaired or insolvent,” and a person who satisfies the Illinois residency test as of that date keeps the protection even after moving out of state — the FAQ states this directly (ilhiga.org/FAQ, August 15, 2026). Some states word their test around the liquidation-order date instead; Georgia’s association, for one, describes protection by “your state of residence at the date of the liquidation order” (gaiga.org/FAQ, August 15, 2026). For anyone relocating while a carrier is in trouble, which date applies is not academic.

215 ILCS 5/531.19 forbids any person from publishing a statement that uses the association’s existence for sales, solicitation, or inducement to purchase insurance. The association hosts that statutory text on its own site (ilhiga.org/documents, accessed August 15, 2026). This page presents the insolvency record only as general education about a post-failure backstop, not as a reason to buy insurance.

Three things this page looked for and did not find in primary sources. No ILHIGA or OSD page reviewed on August 15, 2026 states the dollar amounts the association ultimately paid or guaranteed for Illinois owners in the Executive Life estate. Whether Columbian Life policyholders can obtain hardship access to funds during the current rehabilitation is not addressed on OSD’s estate page. And the association’s assessment capacity — how much its member insurers can be made to fund in a given year — appears nowhere in the consumer materials reviewed. Each stays out of the body copy above for that reason.

The Columbian Life docket shows the sequence in real time: conservation arrived confidentially in October 2023, and by the time rehabilitation became public in July 2024, the insurer was already two stages into regulatory action. The $250,000 annuity limit is applied per owner, per failed insurer, but the docket also shows why a public record cannot provide advance warning of every failure. Guaranty coverage is a backstop applied after insolvency, not a reason to buy from or divide a purchase among particular insurers.