Critics say NAIC home insurance data call fails to address affordability crisis

The call for home insurance market data that an association of state insurance regulators conducted earlier this year is being called too little, too late.

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Alan McClain, commissioner of insurance for Arkansas, and chair of the Property & Casualty Insurance Committee at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), announced at NAIC's summer conference on August 15 that the data it collected from insurers from March to June would be analyzed for a report to be issued later this year.

Consumer Federation of America

"Insurers hope and expect that the NAIC will do little more with the data than produce an innocuous and generally uninformative summary of what they received," stated Douglas Heller, director of insurance, Consumer Federation of America, in a written response to questions.

The data call is meant to respond to concerns about the availability and affordability of home insurance due to climate change, NAIC officials said in March.

"Many of the nation's insurance commissioners don't seem to appreciate how severe the problems of high cost coverage and insurance unavailability are for millions of American homeowners," Heller added. "This lack of urgency and too many regulators' willingness to prioritize insurance companies over people only ensures that the insurance crisis will get worse."

In May, consumer advocates and academics specializing in climate change and housing issues urged NAIC to provide full access to the collected data. NAIC had said it would not release the collected data publicly, but will share it with the Federal Insurance Office (FIO), a regulatory unit of the U.S. Treasury.

"It is incumbent on the NAIC to make the raw data that are collected available to the public so this information can be put to its most effective use," Heller said. "There is simply not enough capacity or a wide enough perspective at the NAIC to learn most of what can be learned from the data. To ensure that policymakers, regulators, researchers, and the public fully understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges in the insurance market, these data need to be investigated and analyzed in more ways than the NAIC will conceive, let alone be able to achieve."

NAIC's regulators have been meeting regularly to provide their analysis of the collected data, according to McClain, and states will be able to access the data for their own analysis. 

"We have received filings from the vast majority of insurance companies," he said. "NAIC staff have been reviewing files and followed up with many companies about anomalies. In some cases, insurers have had to refile. That process continues so that we have a good data set to analyze."

Heller called NAIC's plans for a summary report on the data "insufficient to the core."