CA Insurance Regulator is aimed at consumer monitoring fees

From And WaltersCalmness

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Thehe a terrifying string of fires This has struck California in recent years, taking dozens of lives and destroying many billions of dollars of property, also created a crisis in property insurance.

Some insurers have abandoned California completely, some refuse to take more customers, many have asked for an increase The fair plan, has seen such a new business that His long -term solvency is in doubtS Meanwhile, fire victims often complain that insurers and their regulators have low charging settlement offers.

Obviously, the property insurance market in California needs some kind of reform to improve its viability, but it is an infinitely complex melange of financial risks and awards, truly understood by only a few experts.

Ricardo LaraA former state legislator, it turned out that he was the elected California Insurance Commissioner when the crisis hits the home, so by default he had to develop a response, while at the same time he filed complaints of victims and dealing with the request of premium insurers to cover increasing losses.

Lara has suggest a major overhaul in how insurers calculate their potential lossesSearch for premium adjustments and shift from using only past attempt to design future losses, called “crash modeling”. It is necessary, he said, to persuade insurers to continue writing policies in California and to give up the crash on the market.

The proposal intensified Lara’s feud with the consumer guard, which began before his election in 2018.

The organization had sponsored 1988 a measure of vote This made the position of the insurance commissioner from a job in a selected post and set a new set of premium regulation rules.

The consumer keeper then enjoyed a close relationship with the selected commissioners and received many millions of dollars in Intervention Fees to participate in the event of premiums at the Ministry of Insurance. The non -profit organization claims that its participation has saved consumers much more dollars than it was raised in a taxi.

Since the beginning of Lara’s office offer, the user guard has been critical of him, claiming to be too friendly with insurers. When Lara revealed her main repair of the premium process to determine, accepting an approach supported by an approach, the feud escalated.

Nevertheless, during Lara’s term, the consumer guard continues to receive large intervention fees paid by insurers. However, this may not be true in the future.

Last week Lara suggested another procedural repairThis time, changing how intervention fees are calculated and awarded, saying that “these reforms will first protect consumers from hidden fees, they will establish clear guidelines for participation in intervention and strengthen the supervision of the administrative hearing system to prevent unnecessary delays.”

Lara’s proposal includes a redefination of the “Substantial Contribution” standard for awarding intervention fees requiring more public reports on intervention activities and compensation, requiring employees chairing tariff cases to submit regular reports on pending cases and require the Ministry of Insurance to publish cases online.

The element of the “significant contribution” of the proposal is one that can influence the finance of the consumer warden. Lara left without a doubt that she was aimed at the organization.

Lara described the present process, created by the first elected Commissioner John Garamendi in the early 1990s as a lack of transparency and “dominated by a small number of repetitive participants”.

To refine this characteristic, Lara released a list of 28 percent this year26 of which led to nearly $ 1.4 million dollars for an intervention fees for a customer guard.

The consumer guard, not surprising, opposes Lara’s new rules.

“If the purpose of the new rules for compensation for the insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara is to introduce new interventions in the process, his provisions will do the opposite,” said Jamie Court, president of the consumer guard. “By making it difficult to pay interventions, it will discourage interventions to participate.”

In this way, the feud, at the age of 6, will continue, at least until the restrictions of the deadline not to end the term of Lara and another commissioner is not elected next year.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.