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When regulators, insurers, and consumer advocates meet next week to shape what market conduct oversight will look like in the future, the need for uniformity will be a common point of interest that many say they plan to emphasize.
A public hearing is scheduled during the summer meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners in New Orleans. Insurers and consumer advocates are scheduled to offer their feedback to three papers that regulators have issued.
Those papers address: the overall goal of market conduct exams with an emphasis on focusing limited department resources in the most needed areas; whether there should be a market analysis model that would include, among other things, a market conduct annual statement; and whether a zone approach should be used.
Uniformity was raised both by insurers and Kevin Hennosy, a consumer advocate and executive director of SpreadtheRisk.org in Kansas City, Mo.
A redesign, Hennosy says, should start with a uniform market conduct annual statement including very basic data that would be compiled in an NAIC database and could be used to run statistical tests that would identify companies that were outside industry norms. That would not necessarily mean that it was a good or bad finding, but that it was outside of what is standard, he explains.
Using that as a base, Hennosy says regulators could make inquiries about why there was a difference from the norm and then determine whether a targeted exam was needed.
