Birny Birnbaum (Photo: Birnbaum)
A consumer representative says industry groups should ease up on state regulators' efforts to develop new life insurance illustration summary rules.
The National Association of Insurance Commissioners' Life Insurance Illustration Issues Working Group is in charge of the summary update project.
Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the Center for Economic Justice, says representatives from the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) and the National Association of Insurance Financial Advisors (ACLI) are exaggerating how much impact proposed delivery time rules would have.
Industry reps are also have unrealistic ideas about how the policy summary delivery rules should relate to life insurance agents, Birnbaum says.
"The explicit charge to the working group is to review specific consumer disclosures, not to promote agents in the sales process," Birnbaum writes in comments sent to the working group.
The NAIC is a Kansas City, Missouri-based group for state insurance regulators. It cannot normally set insurance rules, but states often start with NAIC models when developing their own rules. In some cases, states may arrange for some types of NAIC rule and parameters updates to apply in their jurisdictions automatically.
The Life Insurance Illustration Issues Working Group
Members of the NAIC's Life Insurance Illustration Issues Working Group are trying to come up with ways to improve the narrative policy summary required by Section 7B of the NAIC's Life Insurance Illustrations Model Regulation (Model Number 582) and the policy summary required by Section 5A(2) of the Life Insurance Disclosure Model Regulation (Model Number 580).
The working group is supposed to look at ideas for promoting "consumer readability and understandability of these life insurance policy summaries, including how they are designed, formatted and accessed by consumers," according to the working group's section of the NAIC website.
One issue is when consumers should get any policy overview summary.
Birnbaum and many regulators say consumers should get the overviews as early as possible.
Michael Lovendusky, an ACLI rep, and Gary Sanders, a NAIFA rep, have opposed efforts by the working group to require that insurers provide the policy overviews when consumers are applying for coverage, rather than when insurers have delivered policies to the purchasers.
Lovendusky has argued that changing the summary delivery timing rules is outside the scope of the working group's charges.
Sanders has argued that delivering summaries early could lead to the overviews too general, and to diminishing the role of life insurance agents in helping consumers understand coverage options.
