No One’s Watching

Government oversight over insurance pricing and coverage barely exists. Insurers mostly do what they want.

Congress has prohibited any federal regulation of insurance. It delegated insurance regulation to the states, with no standards and no oversight. Most state insurance departments have weak or non-existent authority over insurance rates through prior approval or rejection of requests for rate increases. Most state insurance departments also lack adequate investigators, auditors and other professionals, preventing them from recommending appropriate insurance rates and coverage. In other words, with few exceptions, state insurance departments have neither the authority nor the funding to exercise proper control over insurance industry pricing.