Birny Birnbaum says one thing state advocacy agencies could do would
be to fight racism.
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.
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.
Birnbaum suggested in the new proposal that the NAIC should
adopt a model that would:
·
Define fair and unfair
discrimination in insurance.
·
Define and ban use of
“proxy discrimination against protected classes,” or use of indicators other
than race, gender and the like that indirectly lead to what Birnbaum sees as
being unfair discrimination against members of groups of people who are
supposed to be protected against discrimination by state and federal
antidiscrimination laws.
·
Require regulators to
watch for unfair discrimination involving use of data, algorithms, artificial
intelligence, advisory organizations, or the “statistical agents” that collect
data for insurance organizations.
·
Give consumers more
and easier-to-use information about insurance, to help them become better
insurance shoppers.
Birnbaum also proposed funding a BICA agency in each state with
an assessment of 10 cents to 25 cents per individual insurance policy issued in
a state. He also called for imposing the assessment on each certificate for a
member of a group policy or master policy issued in a state.
The BICA should have the same kind of access to non-public
insurance company information that a state’s insurance department could see,
and it should have the standing to speak for consumers in a state’s
insurance regulatory proceedings, according to Birnbaum.
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