This story at Insurance Journal caught my eye today:
Washington Democrats and Safeco Corp. are battling over the company’s use of credit scores in canceling policies while Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike McGavick was chief executive.
The skirmish has moved to Thurston County Superior Court, where Safeco is resisting the state Democratic Party’s request to publicize more data from a 2003 state insurance commissioner’s study, The Seattle Times reported.
Democrats want to know the identity of a company referred to as “Firm 1.” The state study found that firm used credit scores in canceling auto policies, disproportionately affecting minorities, divorced women and poor people.
Safeco is resisting the Democrats’ request, citing concerns about trade secrets. The company also wants to keep secret an unpublished 2002 study by Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, which focused on the effects of Safeco’s credit scoring, The Times reported.
Many of us who were working with insurance scoring were very upset with how over-aggressively Safeco adopted scoring a few years ago. The complaints generated by the company’s initial blanket policy of canceling the lowest-scoring quintile of their book prompted a wave of regulation across the country, which in turn made my life mighty entertaining for a couple of years.
I’ll be watching the antics in Washington with both interest from both my professional side and my armchair-pundit side.