Sometimes, the day job interfering with my extracurricular online reading can be annoying. For example, I would have been very interested to have read this blog entry from the Palm Beach Post yesterday:
Florida Insurance Commissioner Kevin McCarty is taking his campaign to stop auto and property insurers from denying coverage or charging higher rates to consumers with bad credit to Capitol Hill.
McCarty will testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations at 10 a.m. [Wednesday, 21 May] in Washington about the negative effects of insurance scoring on poor and minority groups.
I would have love to have caught the webcast of the hearing. The Subcommittee has a web page specifically for this hearing, providing prepared written testimony. Presumably a transcript of the hearing will be posted there when available.
Looking through the description of the hearing, and skimming through some of the comments, it sounds like the hearing is somewhat better-balanced than the blog post would suggest. It’s a hearing on HR 5633, a bill to impose a federal ban on insurer’s use of credit information if it proves discriminatory or a proxy for race, ethnicity, etc.
On the surface, it seems like a silly bill, since it prohibits something that’s already prohibited…but it seems that some legislators, regulators, consumer advocates, and attorneys would choose to view the bill as a virtual ban on scoring, prescribed from the federal level.
(If we’re going to start having federal prohibitions on underwriting activities, could we go ahead and start having the option for federal regulation across the board, in lieu of the current patchwork of 57 state regulatory agencies?)
Despite what the blog post indicates, it seems that there are folks testifying on both sides of the issue. While I may disagree with the pro-prohibition crowd…well the testimony looked like a pretty reasonable depiction of the views on the subject.
This late in an election year, I doubt that it has legs. However, wacky things can happen, and with the insurance industry almost as unpopular as the President and Congress…well, it’s easy to imagine some federal politicians engaging in silliness to win points with constituents through “protecting” them from the evil insurance industry.