I've spent most of my career as an Insurance Broker believing insurance needs regulation.

I still do.

Insurance companies hold enormous financial obligations. Consumers buy policies today based on a promise that may not need to be fulfilled for years. There have to be rules governing solvency, claims practices, marketing and how companies treat policyholders.

But I do think our industry needs to get more comfortable asking another question.

At what point does regulation stop protecting the consumer and start making insurance more expensive, more confusing and harder to sell?

We don't ask that question nearly enough.

Insurance Is Already One Of The Most Regulated Businesses In America

Most insurance regulation in the United States remains state-based, a system preserved by the McCarran-Ferguson Act. That means an insurance company operating nationally can be dealing with 50 different regulatory environments before we even start talking about federal requirements.

There are good reasons for some of that.

Florida's insurance problems aren't identical to Ohio's. California has risks that Georgia doesn't. A regulator closer to the local market may understand those differences better than somebody sitting in Washington.

I'm generally a believer in keeping that authority closer to the states.

What concerns me is what happens when state regulation, federal regulation and carrier compliance departments begin stacking requirements on top of each other.

Eventually somebody pays for all of it.

Usually the customer.

And somebody has to actually implement it.

Usually the agent.

We Have To Stop Pretending Regulation Is Free

Every new compliance requirement sounds reasonable when you look at it by itself.

Keep another record.

Add another disclosure.

Change another form.

Document another conversation.

Take another certification.

None of those things individually destroys an insurance agency.

Put enough of them together and you've created an enormous administrative operation that has very little to do with helping somebody buy insurance.

The bigger companies can absorb that fairly well.

A national insurer can hire another compliance team. A giant brokerage can build a department around the regulation.

The independent agent doesn't have a regulatory affairs department down the hall.

He has himself, a couple employees and customers waiting for their calls to be returned.

That distinction matters.

Regulation designed to control large corporations can unintentionally create a competitive advantage for those same corporations because they're the ones with enough scale to absorb the cost.

That's not something conservatives invented as a talking point. It's basic economics.

Florida Gives Us An Interesting Example

Florida's property insurance market is worth watching because we recently saw what can happen when government changes rules affecting the economics of an insurance market.

The state enacted substantial reforms aimed at litigation and claim-related legal costs.

According to the Insurance Information Institute, nearly 20 new property insurers have entered Florida since those reforms. Citizens Property Insurance Corporation has also seen its policy count fall substantially as more business moved back into the private market. Triple-I reported that insurance litigation filings fell 23% from 2023 to 2024 and another 25% during the first half of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.

I'm not suggesting every Florida insurance problem has been solved.

We're still dealing with hurricane exposure, reinsurance costs and some homeowners paying premiums that would have sounded ridiculous ten years ago.

But something changed.

The economics became more attractive to insurers and competition started returning.

That's worth paying attention to.

Government didn't create cheaper insurance by ordering insurance companies to charge less.

It changed some of the conditions under which the market operated.

There's a lesson in there.

Good Regulation Should Make A Market Work Better

This is where I probably lean a little more conservative than some people in the insurance conversation.

My first instinct when a market isn't working properly isn't to ask what new government program we can create.

I want to know why the market isn't working.

Is there enough competition?

Are regulations preventing new companies from entering?

Has litigation changed the economics?

Are consumers actually able to compare products?

Have we created rules that protect existing companies from new competitors?

Sometimes the answer really is that government needs to intervene.

Other times government may already be part of the problem.

We should be mature enough to admit both can be true.

Consumer Protection Still Matters

None of this means deregulate everything.

There are plenty of areas where regulation is necessary.

Insurer solvency might be the easiest example. A cheap policy from a company that cannot pay its claims isn't much of a bargain.

Market conduct matters too. The NAIC itself is currently modernizing the market-conduct regulatory framework as insurance distribution and consumer expectations change.

I support that basic mission.

Where I think regulators need to be careful is assuming another rule automatically creates another layer of consumer protection.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it creates another disclosure nobody reads.

Those aren't the same thing.

Ask any Medicare agent who has watched a beneficiary sign or acknowledge page after page of required material.

At some point, additional disclosure can actually make the important information harder to find.

Agents See The Results Before Washington Does

One thing I wish policymakers understood better is that independent agents sit in an interesting place in the insurance system.

We're between the carrier and the customer.

When rates become unaffordable, we hear about it.

When a carrier tightens underwriting, we know pretty quickly. When consumers don't understand a new rule, we're usually the people explaining it.

That gives agents a perspective I don't think gets enough attention when insurance policy is written.

Most agents aren't asking for zero regulation.

We want markets that work.

We want enough carriers competing that we can actually give customers choices. We want financially strong companies paying legitimate claims. We want bad actors thrown out of the industry because they hurt everybody's reputation.

What we don't need is regulation for the sake of proving something was regulated.

The Insurance Industry Needs To Speak Up More

Insurance isn't a popular industry politically.

It's easy to attack insurance companies because everybody has paid an insurance premium and almost nobody enjoys doing it.

Agents tend to get caught in the middle.

We shouldn't be afraid to defend the role insurance plays in the economy.

Businesses take risks because insurance exists.

Banks lend money on homes because those homes can be insured. Contractors take on projects because liability risks can be transferred. Families recover after hurricanes, fires and deaths because somebody agreed beforehand to assume part of that financial risk.

Insurance isn't some unnecessary layer sitting on top of the American economy.

It's part of the machinery that allows the economy to take risks.

That doesn't mean our industry should be immune from criticism.

Far from it.

But policymakers should understand what they're regulating before deciding that another requirement is automatically going to help the consumer.

Maybe The Better Goal Is Smarter Regulation

I don't think the choice is regulation or no regulation.

That's too simple.

The question should be whether a regulation solves a real problem and whether the benefit is greater than the cost it adds to the system.

If the answer is yes, keep it.

If a rule has been around for 20 years and nobody can explain what consumer problem it still solves, maybe it's time to look at it again.

Government should protect consumers.

Then it should give insurers, agents and entrepreneurs enough room to compete for their business.

Because competition does something regulation never will.

It gives the customer the ability to walk away.

And in the long run, I still believe that's one of the strongest forms of consumer protection we have.