After the past couple of weeks, that the feds would want to be more actively involved in regulating industry should be no surprise. Seen in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber link):
The U.S. Treasury Department has chosen sides in the fight over state versus federal insurance regulation, standing squarely in the corner of large insurers who want the option to be regulated at the national level.
An executive summary of the Treasury Department’s blueprint for overhauling regulation of financial firms calls for the creation of an Office of National Insurance to be housed within Treasury. The new regulator would have oversight over insurance firms that chose an optional federal charter.
The support for the federal charter marks the first time the Bush administration has officially weighed in on the long-running debate over insurance regulation. States currently have the authority to oversee insurers, and though efforts have been made to standardize forms and other requirements, a number of differences still exist between states.
Professionally, I’d welcome a single regulatory body to deal with. I’ve spent too effing much of my time recently working on state filings for countrywide rollouts of new specialty commercial lines products. In fact, my calendar this coming week is almost full with time blocked off to respond to frequently conflicting requests from different states’ DOI’s. Give me one regulatory body to deal with, rather than 52, and I could get back to doing real work.
However, as an armchair consumer advocate, I do have some concerns. Consider, for example, some recent “fun” my wife and I have had with health insurance, made possible by a lack of consumer protections in federal regulation.
Sure, the feds do a pretty good job in protecting the public from fiscal insecurity of regulated businesses, but otherwise consumer protection is seemingly a heretical concept among federal regulators.