The National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors and the American Council of Life Insurers are poring over the new Antitrust Modernization Commission report.
The report, released Tuesday, recommends that Congress consider eliminating insurers' limited antitrust exemption under McCarran-Ferguson, arguing that recent trends point to the benefit of ending such arrangements.
But Michael Kerley, a senior vice president at NAIFA, says the commission report "buttresses our position that the McCarran-Ferguson Act should be retained as is."
One section of the report states, "No statutory change is recommended to the current role of the states in non-merger civil antitrust enforcement."
"NAIFA thinks this recommendation is critical, because the report otherwise fails to differentiate in any way between naked exemptions from the antitrust laws–like the major league baseball exemption, for example–and the McCarran-Ferguson-type exemption, which applies only to the extent that the states are actively regulating the insurance-related conduct," Kerley says.
