The New Bailout.
There has been lots of talk about something called the Federal Insurance Office, by whatever name, taking over the regulation of insurance. As you know, States and State Insurance Commissioners have regulated insurance ever since insurance was regulated.
There has been one major exception that comes to mind. As a part of the Affordable Care Act or the Obamacare law, the new Federal Insurance Office was given the authority to regulate rates for new Health Insurance coverages.
Maybe it is not such a good idea to expand that authority, at least not right now, if ever. The current White House's failure at www.healthcare.gov needs no amplification, no highlighting. It is a spectacular failure. The failure of www.healthcare.gov can be directly traced to the people supposedly in charge of regulating the new health insurance. They have demonstrated that they simply do not know what they are doing here.
In the past, the major supporters of giving the Federal Government the authority to regulate insurance and taking that authority away from the States, have been drawn from a small pool of people: insurance company executives. Insurance companies have found it hard, their representatives say, to comply with regulations in 50 States and the District of Columbia. They say further that they would prefer to deal with one set of national regulations.
Parenthetically, State regulation of insurance has never seemed to be an obstacle to making vast profits in the insurance industry.
But, even accepting past arguments from a small number of insurance company executives at face value, I wonder if they would still maintain the position that, even now in the face of actual evidence and unquestionable failure, a Federal Insurance Commissioner would still be preferable in their eyes to State Insurance Commissioners who for a long time have demonstrated a much higher degree of competence, even success at what they do, even now.
© 2013 by Dennis J. Wall. All rights reserved. No claim to original U.S. Government works.
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