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
Transfer of highly individualized loss exposures that is not based on the usual pooling principles of insurance such as risk identification and classification selection. Rather than setting ...
Maximum age of an applicant or insured beyond which an insurance company will not initially underwrite a risk or continue to insure it. For example, under some forms of renewable term life ...
Deferred annuity under which one premium payment is made and the annuity is paid up (no further premium payments are required). ...
Methods by which a home office underwriter chooses applicants that an insurer will accept. The underwriter's job is to spread the costs equitably among members of the group to be insured. ...
Section providing protection in four areas: Coverage A (Home) the structure of the home (basic contract amount). Other property coverages in Section I are expressed as a percentage of ...
Fund in a segregated account to provide for the return of unearned premiums on policies that are canceled. ...
Federal statute defining the federal tax code, covering such topics as credits against tax; business-related credits; computing credit for investment in certain depreciable property; ...
Financial instruments whose principal and income are not established in advance according to contractual terms set forth in the financial instruments document. Both the principal and income ...
Clause in an insurance policy that provides for the payment of a monetary sum to the individual (s) who incurred the loss. ...
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