State Supervision And Regulation
Primary responsibility for overseeing the insurance industry that has rested with individual states since 1945, after Congress passed the MCCARRAN-FERGUSON ACT (PUBLIC LAW 15). In addition to supervision and regulation, states receive taxes and fees paid by the industry that amount to several billion dollars a year. State insurance laws are administered by state insurance departments that are responsible for making certain that (1) rates are adequate, not unfairly discriminatory, and not unreasonably high, and (2) insurance companies in the state are financially sound and able to pay future claims. To this end, states set requirements for company reserves, require annual financial statements, and examine company books. Each state has an insurance commissioner or superintendent who is either elected or appointed by the governor, with responsibility for investigating company practices, approving rates and policy forms, and ordering liquidation of insolvent insurers. The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF INSURANCE COMMISSIONERS (NAIC) has drafted model legislation and worked for policy uniformity, but regulations vary widely from state to state.
Whether insurers should be regulated by the states or the federal government remains at issue, but so far insurers and the NAIC lobbying have been effective in resisting federal regulation. Nevertheless, the federal government has a profound effect on the insurance industry through its taxes and a variety of regulations.
Popular Insurance Terms
Enacted on April 1, 1997; provides protection against creditors for irrevocable trusts provided that the trust has a grantor who is a discretionary beneficiary. In order for the statute of ...
Requirement of the Internal Revenue Service that any dividend payments received are subject to a 20% withholding if the investor fails to furnish the dividend payer with the investor's ...
Concealment of the actual fact. For example, an insurance agent tells a prospective insured that a policy provides a particular benefit when in actual fact this benefit is not in the ...
Early type of no-fault automobile insurance developed by two law professors, Robert Keeton and Jeffrey O'Connell. Its basic premise is that for many accidents it is impossible to place the ...
Statistical procedure used to calculate a premium rate based on the loss experience of an insured group. Applied in group insurance, it is the opposite of manual rates. Here the premiums ...
Ruling that, under current tax law, an insurance company that has incurred a net income loss in a given year may charge that loss against its taxable income in a subsequent year. This ...
Form of insurance that insurance companies buy for their own protection, "a sharing of insurance." An insurer (the reinsured) reduces its possible maximum loss on either an individual risk ...
End of a defined time period that dividends become payable to the policyholder. ...
Financial technique for providing term death coverage for an entity. With this procedure: (1) an individual purchases an ordinary life insurance policy and completes an agreement with the ...
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