The National Association of Insurance Commissioners plans to put about 43% of the sessions on the agenda for its upcoming spring meeting in Phoenix behind closed doors.
That's down from 46% at the NAIC's 2023 spring meeting but up from 36% at the group's 2022 spring meeting. The next meeting is set to start March 14 and run until March 18.
Birny Birnbaum, the executive director of the Center for Economic Justice in Austin, Texas, and a longtime NAIC watcher, said in an email that the insurance regulator group should work harder to open sessions up to the public, to avoid giving the impression that it makes most of its decisions in private.
NAIC officials point to a longstanding policy that gives it the ability to keep the public out of some types of sessions, such as sessions concerning NAIC administration, strategic planning for federal legislative matters, and subjects that it has to keep confidential due to agreements with other organizations.
What it means: A conflict over session access could raise the profile of the NAIC, a Kansas City, Missouri-based insurance regulator group that helps influence regulation of insurance company and managed care company activities that account for about 10% of U.S. gross domestic product.
The NAIC spring meeting: Federal law leaves regulation of the business of insurance to the states. The NAIC helps state insurance regulators share ideas and draft model insurance laws and regulations.
States can choose whether or not to adopt the models, but they often start with the NAIC models when developing their own proposals.
Public sessions at the upcoming NAIC meeting will give members of the public, including consumer advocates and insurance company representatives, a chance to watch bodies such as the Health Actuarial Task Force and Statutory Accounting Principles Working Group at work.
Many of the events taking place in a "regulator-only" format include breakfasts and luncheons. But they also include sessions of bodies such as the Antifraud Task Force and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act Working Group.
At press time, the preliminary agenda did not say why some groups, such as the National Insurance Producer Registry board, were holding regulator-only sessions.
In other cases, the NAIC gives a short explanation.
