Actually, people blame the insurance companies all the time, but it's usually not the directly the case. In years of working with aircraft leasing and flying clubs, I never had an insurance company tell me how many hours of experience a renter had to have. The club always developed its own rules as to experience level and the insurance company blessed the whole package for us (including all the disparate planes in the fleet together). The rates once set were almost always directly scaled by hull value.
Of course, they predicate the policy on the pilots following the rules the club has set down, so yes in fact, the insurance now requires it only because the club proposed it. However, when we could get it, we also had a breach of warranty rider that covered us in case the renter (through no fault of club management) decided to break the club rules.
