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
Additions or subtractions of a mortality table to reflect changing levels of mortality due to advancement in medicine, geriatrics, and sanitation. These adjustments make a mortality table ...
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Retirement payments to be credited for future years of service with an employer. ...
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Employee benefit program that emphasizes the pursuit of a lifestyle that minimizes the occurrence of sickness through an organized program of preventive medicine. Such a program includes ...
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 ...
Coverage under which the face value, premiums, and plan of insurance can be changed at the discretion of the policy owner in the following manner, without additional policies being issued: ...
Measure used in the retrospective rating method for workers compensation insurance. A factor is applied to the incurred losses during the rating period in question in order to generate a ...
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