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
Reinstatement of an insurance policy or bond to its original face amount (face of policy) after the payment by the insurer of a loss. The purpose of this type of coverage is to indemnify ...
Coverage against loss as the result of a burglary. Found as part of the commercial package policy that has generally replaced the special multiperil insurance (smp) policy and the ...
Sum provided by a disability income insurance that pays a multiple of the monthly indemnity to cover the costs associated with a retraining course attended by the insured wage earner when ...
Market in which buyers dominate trading and force financial asset prices up. ...
Social insurance that provides benefits to temporarily disabled workers in a few states. Five states require employers to pay cash benefits if workers are disabled. They are Rhode Island, ...
Association of life insurance companies focusing on legislation and public relations that may affect the life insurance business on federal, state, and local levels. Membership is composed ...
Method of calculating the life insurance policy's cash surrender value (CSV) not contingent upon the calculation of the policy's reserve such that the CSV will approximate the asset share ...
Trust under which the beneficiary (cannot be a charitable beneficiary) receives a fixed percentage (not less than 5% of the trust's annual value) of the net fair market value of the trust ...
New pension-accounting rule created by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. The objective of this rule is to clarify pension accounting so that investors, employers, and employees will ...
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