Can I Get an Oh My!

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No Delaware public figure generates more angry letters to the Delaware Liberal tip line more than Insurance Commissioner,  Karen Weldin Stewart.  We have probably received more than 50 of them…

Insurance Commissioner is Failing Aggrieved Patients

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That title is stolen from the News Journal Opinion page today, whose writers I have to give some credit to today. They highlight an odd bit of business, where Senator John D. Rockefeller, D-W.V has written to Delaware Blue Cross to ask them to provide detailed documentation of why they would deny cardiac testing prescribed by doctors to patients exhibiting symptoms of heart failure.

Lobbyists to the IC’s Office?

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On 30 July 2009, the Delaware Insurance Commissioner's office sent out a Press Release announcing their "new" initiative for "the formation of a new revenue generating division within the Department of Insurance entitled the Bureau of Captive and Financial Insurance Products". There was a subsequent Press Release, this time working hard at making the case that this is an economic development task for the state. A bit of small print at the end of the first Press Release caught my attention:

Revisiting Reserve Requirements

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I wrote to highlight a blog post redwaterlily wrote over at her blog discussing the current rule change by KWS to reduce the reserve requirements by life insurers — reserves intended to try to ensure that these companies are adequately funded to pay policyholder claims.

The conversation continued over at that post on a number of different fronts, but I want to go back to the reserve requirements, as KWS’s Chief of Staff has added to a comment in that thread.

While I don’t see a ton of news releases, I was struck by how this one was written. It goes through the history of a review of these reserving requirements via analysis groups at an industry trade association (NAIC) and how this association rejected the Life Insurance Industry group’s request for a broad recommendation for reserve “relief”. You can see the summary of that meeting here — this is the NAIC’s own Press Release. This is how Elliot Jacobson characterizes the current position of the NAIC:

On January 29, 2009, the Executive Committee of the NAIC decided to withhold their support of this relief on a national, uniform basis for the 2008 year-end preliminary annual statement filings that are due March 1st due to the inadequate time to perform the necessary evaluation.

The NAIC actually voted against these life insurance industry proposals, saying:

“Today’s vote reflects our belief that it is not appropriate to make emergency, permanent industry-wide changes for which the need has not been demonstrated.”

You should read the whole thing yourself, but even the NAIC decided that there was not enough information to demonstrate that the industry had any real need of relief at this time. Further, they caution against rushing to provide help where the need is not yet proven. This ruling, of course, doe not restrict these companies from appealing directly to the states, which is exactly what has been happening. Elliot Jacobson says that the list of states granting such relief is up on the NAIC website, which I can’t find. (And it may be there, this is a tough to navigate website, I think.) A Google search turns up Ohio as an approver of some reserve relief and Virginia and NH as against.

Elliot’s press release also refers us to the NAIC website for the insurers who got this relief. Why wouldn’t the ICs office just say who they are? It is only three companies and in a release this long, it wouldn’t take up much room. And why wouldn’t these just be listed on the Delaware IC’s website? In any event, I can’t find these on the NAIC website.