Legislative Bills
Dan Bernier
As the first regular session of the 129th legislation has ended. A highlight of the legislature was overwhelmingly legislators seeing value in insurance agents in the process of insurance. During the debate on the short-term health bills, many legislatures would go as far as to ban online sales and force in person meetings with an agent before someone was allowed to buy the product and the general theme of the value that agents add to the process was carried throughout the legislature.
A concern with the legislature would be that there is no meaningful progress on helping a failing small group medical insurance market. To a large extent, the legislature does not have a lot of options here. We cannot broaden the rating bands as the Federal Government prohibits that. There is no money on the State level to do a reinsurance pool for the small group market and the subsidies under the ACA created an incentive for the individual market and there were not meaningful subsidies for the small group market. Hopefully going forward one of the things the legislature would start to do is really focus on the costs of health care and realize that we cannot afford what is going on. This would mean scrutinizing costs for hospitals in the state which is often politically unpopular. It also means dealing with prescription drugs and other factors driving health care costs.
While it was only a few bills that would not do a lot of damage to the market, we are seeing an increase in government’s interest in getting involved in life insurance underwriting. A few bills nibbling around the edges at this point are by no means jeopardizing our life insurance market. However, if the government is going to get drastically involved in life insurance underwriting this could really undermine our markets as it has the medical insurance markets and we need to keep an eye on the increasing number of bills dealing with life insurance.
The big issue going into next year will be government looking to get into the business of retirement savings. In each of the prior two legislatures we have been able to defeat legislation proposing to do this. However, new legislation comes back every single year. There is no problem with availability of products for retirement savings
A concern with the legislature would be that there is no meaningful progress on helping a failing small group medical insurance market. To a large extent, the legislature does not have a lot of options here. We cannot broaden the rating bands as the Federal Government prohibits that. There is no money on the State level to do a reinsurance pool for the small group market and the subsidies under the ACA created an incentive for the individual market and there were not meaningful subsidies for the small group market. Hopefully going forward one of the things the legislature would start to do is really focus on the costs of health care and realize that we cannot afford what is going on. This would mean scrutinizing costs for hospitals in the state which is often politically unpopular. It also means dealing with prescription drugs and other factors driving health care costs.
While it was only a few bills that would not do a lot of damage to the market, we are seeing an increase in government’s interest in getting involved in life insurance underwriting. A few bills nibbling around the edges at this point are by no means jeopardizing our life insurance market. However, if the government is going to get drastically involved in life insurance underwriting this could really undermine our markets as it has the medical insurance markets and we need to keep an eye on the increasing number of bills dealing with life insurance.
The big issue going into next year will be government looking to get into the business of retirement savings. In each of the prior two legislatures we have been able to defeat legislation proposing to do this. However, new legislation comes back every single year. There is no problem with availability of products for retirement savings