Some House members are fighting to give state insurance commissioners the final say when commissioners and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) get into fights over jurisdiction.
Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., has introduced H.R. 3746, the Business of Insurance Regulatory Reform Act of 2017 bill.
Provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act, the act that created the CFPB, already limit the CFPB's ability to regulate insurance. The act blocks the agency from regulating the business of insurance, except in some cases in which providing insurance coverage is closely related to providing credit.
H.R. 3746 would further restrict the CFPB's ability to get involved with insurance.
The bill would limit the CFPB's ability to regulate any person overseen by a state insurance regulator.
If a federal law did give the CFPB some say over a person under the eye of a state insurance regulator, then the CFPB would have to construe its ability to apply the law to a person regulated by a state insurance regulator narrowly, according to the bill text.
If the CFPB and a state insurance regulator had different ideas about how to apply Dodd-Frank rules to a person regulated by the insurance regulator, the authority to enforce the rules "shall be broadly construed in favor of the authority of a state insurance regulator," according to the bill text.
Duff has one Republican cosponsor and two Democratic cosponsors: Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo.; Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis.; and Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo.
A House Financial Services Committee subcommittee considered the bill at a hearing last week.
The committee has posted a collection of documents related to the hearing here.
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