NU Online News Service, June 19, 2:45 p.m. — Philadelphia
Regulators here recently for the summer meeting of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, Kansas City, Mo., talked about the possibility of amending the Privacy of Consumer Financial and Health Information Regulation, a model regulation that the NAIC adopted in 1999.
Regulators assured insurance industry representatives in the audience at a meeting of the privacy issues working group that the proposed amendments would be clarifications to the existing model, not changes.
But the industry representatives expressed concern about a proposed amendment that would require insurers to send notices to individuals insured by a group policy.
The amendment, Section 9-A(b), says that providing a notice to covered individuals is optional, unless the individual is an insurer's consumer or the individual requests a notice.
In a section addressing the definition of consumer, the text of the proposed amendment states that, if an insurer provides notice to the plan sponsor, or to the group policyholder or workers' compensation policyholder, and does not disclose individual, non-public personal financial information to a nonaffiliated third party, the individuals would be covered by the group notice and would not be defined as the insurer's consumers.
