Life Insurance Consumer Advocacy Center

A June 2021 decision from a California appellate court held than an insurance company had no duty of care to supervise its agent and therefore was not liable for the agent’s misconduct, egregious as it was.  See Williams v. National Western Life Insurance Company, Case No. C090436 (Third Appellate District, June 11, 2021)  https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6723238997375948811&q=williams+v.+national+western+life+insurance&hl=en&as_sdt=2006  …

A working paper released in 2021 and soon to be published in the Stanford Law Review, entitled Regulatory Arbitrage and the Persistence of Financial Misconduct, shows that financial advisors who exit the broker-dealer regulatory regime because of misconduct frequently become (or remain licensed as) insurance producers, where they are more than ten times as likely…

Insurance regulators have put into effect – presumed effective after Dec. 14, 2020 – more conservative rules for illustrating the popular index-based Universal Life policies sold by dozens of life insurance carriers.  Revising illustration rules was last attempted in late Summer of 2015 via Actuarial Guideline 49 (AG49), but newer products and their illustrated projections…

The Life insurance Consumer Advocacy Center (“LICAC”) has proposed a bill entitled the Life Insurance Consumers’ Bill of Rights, with the goal of protecting consumers from losing their savings in Life Insurance Investment Schemes.  The concept for the bill was first discussed with representatives of the California Department of Insurance in February 2020.  The reforms…

In the Spring of 2020, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (“NAIC”) adopted a new “model regulation” that purports to protect consumers by toughening the standards that must be followed by agents and insurers selling annuities to consumers.[1]  The new model regulation, called the Suitability in Annuity Transactions Model Regulation (No. 275), was met with…