News & Resources

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 included a provision that has the insurance industry in a kerfuffle. The provision deals with access to the Social Security Death Master File, perhaps the most comprehensive list of deceased Americans available. Life insurance companies in particular use the list to identify insureds and annuitants that have passed away. In fact, thanks in part to Florida’s efforts to hold the companies accountable, a number of life insurance companies have committed to check their lists against the DMF on a more regular basis.

The Social Security Death Master File is in the news again. Florida is an old friend to the DMF, having led the posse of states challenging the use of the file by life insurance companies. As we have discussed before — in our Oct. 12, 2012, post, for example — life insurers had regularly checked the DMF to make sure they were not paying annuities to people who had passed away, but the same insurers had much less frequently checked the list to make sure they were paying life insurance benefits to named beneficiaries in a timely manner. As a result, millions of dollars went undistributed to rightful heirs while the insurance companies collected interest on the unpaid monies.

The House of Representatives is getting closer to acting on legislation addressing the rate hikes imposed by the National Flood Insurance Program. While the companion bill to the Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act passed by the Senate has more than 225 co-sponsors, it is looking less and less likely that the House will follow in the Senate’s footsteps. What is not clear at all is what direction the House bill will take and how far it will stray from the Senate’s; House leadership has been mum on the details.

We are finishing up our discussion of the Senate bill that would delay National Flood Insurance Program rate increases. The bill was tied to another insurance-related bill, the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act.

We are picking up where our Feb. 4 post left off and getting into the particulars of the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. The U.S. Senate has tied the NARAB bill to the Homeowner Flood Insurance Availability Act, the bill that would postpone many flood insurance rate increases resulting from implementation of yet another law, the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act.

We are back to discussing the bill passed by the U.S. Senate that will delay flood insurance rate hikes. The Senate combined the National Flood Insurance Program bill to another insurance bill, the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. We talked about the flood insurance bill in our Jan. 31, 2014, post. Here, we will tackle the NARAB bill.

Seconds after we published our last post, the U.S. Senate passed the bill that included both the Homeowner Flood Insurance Availability Act and the National Association of Registered Agents and Brokers Reform Act. The flood insurance act will keep flood insurance subsidies in place for four years. During that time, the Federal Emergency Management Agency — the agency responsible for the National Flood Insurance Program — will complete an affordability study and perfect new flood maps.

The time has come, it seems, to talk of flood insurance rate hike delays, of months or years and agent licensing and economically distressed policyholders — and, as Lewis Carroll would add, whether pigs have wings. The debate over the rate hikes associated with implementation of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act continues in both the House and the Senate, and the White House has chimed in as well.

We are discussing the various efforts under way to address the flood insurance rate hikes brought about with the implementation of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012. In our last post, we talked about a couple of proposals in Congress, neither of which, it seems, will pass before the end of the year.

The Battle of Biggert-Waters rages on. The state of Florida is fighting on a number of fronts to halt or to mitigate the premium increases that homeowners are facing under the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act. So far, homeowners have not gained much ground.