Thursday, May 20, 2010

Sunset Commission Hearing on the Insurance Commission Tuesday 5/25

The Texas Sunset Commission will be meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday May 25 & 26 in Austin. One of the agenda items is to review and take testimony on the Sunset Staff's evaluation of the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI). The official agenda can be found here. The staff report and submitted comments can be found at the Sunset Commission website. If you are interested in testifying, contact me and I will give you some more information. Also look at this previous post "Attending a Hearing. A Primer" about attending hearings in Austin.

AGENDA
SUNSET ADVISORY COMMISSION
Tuesday and Wednesday, May 25 and 26, 2010
Senate Finance Committ ee Room
Room E1.036, Capitol Extension
1400 Congress Avenue
9:00 a.m.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like John, I hope the TDI is sunset, so that insurance companies will be completely unregulated.

John Coby said...

If you knew what you were talking about you would know they are not regulated now.

Anonymous said...

"If you knew what you were talking about you would know they are not regulated now."

That's ludicrous. There are price controls, for crying out loud. It doesn't get much more regulated than that.

So what are the thousands of pages of the Texas Insurance Code statutes and Texas Administrative Code regulations? A coloring book?

Have you read the Code? Could you, if you tried?

John Coby said...

again, if you knew what you were talking about....

you are like greg. You talk out your ass and complain about others bad breath

Rheinhard said...

If I may sum up, yes, there may be thousands of pages of Insurance code statutes. And the purpose of the TDI is mainly to insure that that insurance corporations never have to really abide by them.

Anonymous said...

The TDI took 21 enforcement actions just in the month of March. This included a $2.5 million fine.

Under John's preferred plan (eliminating the Department), those crooked companies and agents would still be out there, continuing to defraud the public. Now they're not.

Rheinhard, how familiar are you with insurance compliance in Texas? Do you have any relevant experience?

John Coby said...

It looks like we got someone with their nose up the industries butt.

John Coby said...

The fact that Texas has the 2nd highest rates in the nation is hard to overcome. The average cost is twice the national average.

And yet rates have gone down by 6%.

Anonymous said...

What should they be? Right at the national average? Below it? 15% above it?

Rheinhard said...

Relevant experience? Since when were conservatives concerned about relevant experience? How much relevant experience in microbiology did Sarah Palin have when she decreed that genetic research on fruit flies was silly? How much relevant experience with history pedagogy did the Texas Board of Ed have when they decreed that the Enlightenment was an irrelevancy and the separation of church and state a fiction?

Anonymous said...

I have no idea what fruit-fly research or the Enlightenment have to do with price controls on property-casualty insurance, so I can't speak to that.

Rheinhard, where do you think Texas homeowner's-insurance premiums should fall when compared to other states?