States Need Insurance Policyholder Advocacy Agencies: Advocate

A longtime insurance consumer advocate has a proposal for fighting racism in insurance: Give every state a permanent, securely funded agency that can represent consumers in all kinds of disputes involving insurance.

Birny Birnbaum, director of the Center for Economic Justice, included the “Bureau for the Consumer Advocate” (BICA) provision in a proposal for developing “a new model law to address systemic racism in insurance.”

Resources

• Links to NAIC Consumer Liaison Committee resources, including meeting packets, are available here.
• An article about the NAIC’s new artificial intelligence guidelines is available here.

Birnbaum presented the proposal earlier this month, during an online meeting session organized by the Consumer Liaison Committee at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC).

The NAIC is a Kansas City, Missouri-based group for insurance regulators. The Consumer Liaison Committee’s session was part of a “virtual summer meeting” that the NAIC held in place of a scheduled in-person summer meeting, due to COVID-19-related travel restrictions and social distancing rules.

Birnbaum is one of the people with an official designation to speak for consumer interests in NAIC proceedings. He has asserted for years that new artificial intelligence, machine learning and “big data” analysis techniques could hide intentional or unintentional forms of illegal discrimination. The NAIC has included a provision banning discriminatory use of artificial intelligence strategies in insurance in a new set of artificial intelligence principles that the group adopted during an NAIC-wide meeting session.