More with Less

Commentary January 12, 2011 at 03:18 PM
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A few days ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his intent to fold the New York Insurance Department into a Department of Financial Services, mainly because he felt the state could regulate insurance and financial matters better, and because the state has a whopping $10 billion budget shortfall, and the fat has to be trimmed somewhere.

Now, as I understand it, this is something that has been in the works for a few years now, dating back to the Spitzer adnimistration. Back then, Spitzer had wanted to fold the banking and insurance departments together because there were very few New York-chartered banks in the state any longer. Most had consolidated into national banks, and running the banking department was fairly expensive, so why not fold it and insurance regulation into a single agency? Alas, Spitzer never got to accomplish this, mainly because he was accomplishing other things as Client 9 that ended his run as Governor.

Perhaps the effort would have remained in political limbo, were it not for the fact that New York, like many other states, currently faces a gargantuan budget deficit that has given new life to previously shelved cost-cutting measures. What Cuomo proposes is fairly vague at this point, but it is a safe bet that the administration will be providing additional details in the future.

Normally, this sort of thing would not be a concern. However, this is the same Andrew Cuomo who seriously jumped the gun when issuing subpoenas over the use of retained asset accounts last year, and who kept at it even after it became apparent that RAAs were and are a fairly standard industry practice that is not the evil Bloomberg magazine portrays them to be.

Given that Cuomo was campaigning to become Governor at the time, his subpeoenas were a Spitzer-like effort to gain popularity at the cost of an easily vilified insurance industry. it is a familiar story, alas, and considering how influential the New York Insurance Department is, you'd think that Cuomo had all the resources he needed to make the right call on RAAs, and yet, he did not. Now comes the likely merger of the NYID into a Department of Financial Services, which suggests that somewhere, some regulatory bandwidth is going to be cut.

According to the Risk and Insurance Management Society (RIMS), there is a little concern that as New York seeks to increase its efficiencies, it doesn't lose its focus on consumer protection…or its ability to carry it out. I spoke with RIMS on this, and the worry is that a merger like the one Cuomo proposes will almost certainly result in some staff cuts. How deeply will this cut into the state's insurance regulatory apparatus? What expertise might New York lose a it streamlines? So far, it's all up in the air.

RIMS noted that Illinois tried merging its insurance department into a wider financial services authority some years ago and recently broke it apart because the merge just did not work. It is important to keep the Illinois case in mind as New York forges ahead with its merger plans, because as RIMS notes, where New York leads, other states tend to follow (at least, where insurance regulation is concerned), and this merger might very well be the start of a larger regulatory precedent to smaller, leaner regulatory powers. Ohio has already done so. Who might be next?

Saving money is fine, but doing so at the cost of expertise and effective regulation is a cure worse than the disease. Let's hope this doesn't turn out to be a grim reminder of how regulation tends to go south when it's not properly funded.  As it stands, one of my sources tells me that the vast majority of the New York Insurance Department's budget is not spent on insurance at all, but on funding health care for the poor. Things like this, I am told, are fairly common at state insurance departments, which have grown dependent on premium taxes as a means of funding non-insurance initiatives.

Personally, this strikes me as a large-scale insult to the insurance industry and a sign that insurance regulation in general could be done a whole lot better. I've made my feelings about the NAIC well known, but for as much as Cuomo's innovations at streamlining things might very well be a stroke of genius for New York, they point to larger, more systemic issues with how insurance is regulated in the first place.

What do you think? Is New York a model for how things ought to be…or just another example of what needs fixing?

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