Tag: state-based regulation

2022 Insurance Regulation Report Card

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.rstreet.org/2022/12/12/2022-insurance-regulation-report-card/

PDF link of report: https://www.rstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/r-street-policy-study-no-272.pdf

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KEY POINTS

  1. The RSI Insurance Regulation Report Card analyzes and evaluates the effectiveness of state government regulation of property and casualty insurance and assigns a letter grade to all 50 states. The grade for each state was calculated by adding the weighted results from seven categories.
  2. The highest grades were for Kentucky and Arizona, both of which received an A+. At the other end of the spectrum, California and Alaska both scored an F.
  3. 20 states had a higher grade than they did in R Street’s 2020 edition of the Report Card, 23 maintained the same grade and seven had lower grades. This result is positive and means that insurance regulatory regimes have become more effective and efficient in the past two years.

Executive Summary
We are pleased to present the 10th edition of R Street’s Insurance Regulation Report Card, which analyzes and evaluates the effectiveness of U.S. insurance regulation of property and casualty insurance. The first iteration of this report was published in June 2012, and this 2022 edition largely follows the format of prior reports. It begins with a brief introduction on the current landscape of U.S. insurance regulation; reviews recent, relevant federal and state-based regulatory changes; presents a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of each state’s regulation of insurance in seven key categories; and synthesizes those category evaluations by offering a “report card” grade for each state for analysis and comparison purposes.

This report draws on 2021 year-end statutory insurance financial statistics and the most recent datasets available for non-financial information. Sources include data and reports from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), S&P Global Market Intelligence, National Conference of State Legislatures, R Street analyses and others, all of which were accessed through Sept. 30, 2022.

In this report, we seek to shed light on the same three foundational issues we have focused on in past iterations of this report card:
• How free are consumers to choose the insurance products they want?
• How free are insurers to provide the insurance products consumers want?
• How effectively are states discharging their duties to monitor insurer solvency and foster competitive, private insurance markets?

Author(s): Jerry Theodorou

Publication Date: 12 Dec 2022

Publication Site: R Street

Reforming Health Insurance: Competition Across State Lines

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/reforming-health-insurance-across-states?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email

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State governments often operate with limited administrative and technical resources and are highly vulnerable to lobbying by interest groups. Medical providers—physicians and hospitals—are well represented in state capitols, and they frequently push legislatures to mandate that insurers pay for services that they provide, as a way to increase the sales (and prices) of these services.

The typical state had fewer than one benefit mandate in 1970; by 2017, the average was 37. James Bailey of Temple University has estimated that each benefit mandate enacted by states tends to increase health-insurance premiums by 0.4%–1.1% and that new mandates were responsible for 9%–23% of premium increases during 1996–2011. Benefit mandates may have added value to insurance coverage by preventing insurers from leaving gaps in coverage, in order to deter sicker individuals from enrolling.[9] Still, in a study of the period 1989–94, Frank Sloan and Christopher Conover of Duke University estimated that 20%–25% of Americans without health insurance were deterred from purchasing coverage because of the added costs resulting from benefit mandates.[10]

Lobbyists for hospitals and physicians have similarly pushed states to enact laws that increase their pricing power, by making it hard for insurers to exclude them from networks of covered providers. When HMOs began to squeeze hospital costs in the late 1990s, more than 1,000 bills were introduced in state legislatures. Most states enacted laws requiring insurers to reimburse “any willing provider” for treatment according to their standard payment arrangements. A study by Maxim Pinkovskiy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that anti-HMO state laws drove up the incomes of medical providers, increased service use, slowed reduction in hospital lengths of stay, and caused U.S. health-care spending to increase by 2% of GDP—accounting for much of the growth in health-insurance costs in the early 2000s.[11]

Author(s): Chris Pope

Publication Date: 8 June 2021

Publication Site: Manhattan Institute

The COVID-19 Pandemic—An Opportune Time to Update Medical Licensing

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2775345?guestAccessKey=759005fe-3396-4df8-b388-110fefb7e499&utm_source=silverchair&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=article_alert-jamainternalmedicine&utm_content=etoc&utm_term=030121

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Congress could regulate telemedicine across state lines as interstate commerce and establish the “place of service” of a telehealth visit as the location of the clinician, not the location of the patient.5 This definition would allow physicians to provide telehealth services if licensed by the state from which they would conduct telehealth visits. Such legislative action would not override state licensure or insurance regulations but would increase access to telehealth services by removing state licensing as a barrier.

State-based medical licensing is inherently linked to state-based consumer protection, including oversight by state licensing boards and the recourse of malpractice litigation in state courts. Therefore, if telemedicine were regulated as interstate commerce, Congress would need to provide a framework for consumer protections, in particular to guard against states protecting the interests of in-state physicians against claims from out-of-state telehealth patients. For example, Congress could decide that a physician’s home state medical board would be responsible for disciplinary investigations, while the state in which the patient lives would be the jurisdiction for malpractice litigation.

Author(s): Samyukta Mullangi, MD, MBA; Mohit Agrawal, MS, MBA; Kevin Schulman, MD

Publication Date: 13 January 2021

Publication Site: JAMA