NAIC President Andrew N. Mais: No Generation Can Go It Alone

On Tuesday, Aug. 13, National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) President and Connecticut Insurance Commissioner Andrew N. Mais welcomed NAIC Summer National Meeting attendees and delivered the event’s Opening Session address.

After expressing his gratitude for the influences that helped mentor him, Commissioner Mais shared the results of a survey of more than 1,000 Gen Z adults commissioned by the NAIC, saying, “Right now, they are going through their own version of finding their way, just like we did.”

“And,” he continued, the NAIC survey revealed “they are nervous,” with 54 percent responding that the thought of dealing with insurance makes them feel “overwhelmed or anxious.”

Commissioner Mais went on to describe the NAIC’s efforts to “mind the gap” by reaching Gen Z through a recent satellite media tour, and he detailed some of the organization’s other major activities since the Spring National Meeting to close insurance gaps and advance its key priorities.

He concluded by noting that “national meetings like this provide momentum to propel us forward to positive solutions.”

“There is so much that we have to ponder,” said Commissioner Mais. “How do we best help consumers and our insurance marketplaces withstand the risks of today and plan for those that will come tomorrow? How do we lean into the human side of our mission as state insurance regulators? Responding to those questions showcases our state insurance regulatory system at its collaborative best.”

You can read Commissioner Mais’ remarks below.

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I want us to take a moment, think back for a moment—and I know for some of us this may be quite a ways back—but let’s think back to those first days when we were starting out on our own.

It is a strange thing, that initial taste of freedom, in that it is a bit of a contradiction.

On one hand, you feel invincible, expected to take on a world you are sure is just waiting for you to conquer it. But on the other, you can’t quite clear all the pockets of doubt, uncertainty, and intimidation from your mind.

There is so much to figure out so fast, and sometimes it can be hard to feel like you are getting any of it right. For some of us, the circumstances of life meant there were all questions and little confidence.

We used to think of that as “growing pains.” Now, you hear it referred to as “adulting.”

But no matter what term each generation uses, we all have this in common: We can’t do it alone.

I just saw Ray Farmer yesterday as I was walking around, and it reminded me—you know, Ray was the director in South Carolina—and I’m thankful to people like Ray. People like Eric Cioppa. I’m thankful for those who took the time to share with me what they learned along the way, even when I didn’t realize that was what they were doing. I’m grateful to the people who mentored me, helped keep me on track, and stuck with me through the ups and downs that are so much a part of life.

They were there for me, and as a son, a husband, father, grandfather, friend, and, yes, insurance regulator, I can pay that forward by being there for others.

At our Spring National Meeting in Phoenix, I said my year as NAIC president is focused on “minding the gap.” And a key part of that message is making sure as many people as possible know they don’t have to navigate the complex and often confusing world of insurance by themselves.

Take Gen Z, for example.

Right now, they are going through their own version of finding their way, just like we did.

And according to a recent survey commissioned by the NAIC of more than 1,000 adults ages 18 to 27 throughout the United States, they are nervous.

More than half of them—54 percent—said they feel "overwhelmed or anxious" just at "the thought of dealing with insurance."

Thirty-four percent said they were "going to try to wait as long as possible" to get their own life insurance. More than one in four (28 percent) said the exact same thing about health insurance.

It’s one of those interesting sidenotes is that 35 percent of Gen Z adults currently pay for a cell phone protection plan, and I cannot figure that out, as I keep saying, because I don’t know any Gen Zer who’s got their own phone. They’re all on their parents’ plan, but, nonetheless, they pay for cell phone protection. Thirty-five percent. But only 21 percent carry renters insurance to cover the rest of their belongings. 

Just 27 percent and 29 percent, respectively, said they would be able to correctly define “deductible” and “copay.” Nineteen percent, less than one in five, reported that they would be able to correctly define “out of network.”

What is more, consumers with health insurance, especially younger people, are not always aware they have the right to challenge denied insurance claims, according to a separate survey by the Commonwealth Fund. Less than half of the respondents who reported billing errors said they had challenged them. And more than half (54 percent) of the group said they didn’t know they had the right to contest a bill. The gap among the age groups was striking. Sixty percent of 19 to 34 year-olds surveyed said they didn’t know they could challenge a denied claim, compared with 45 percent of 50 to 64 year-olds, and one in four, one in four, take a look, one in four of the total respondents said they didn’t know where to go for help.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not beating up on young adults here. Navigating the world of insurance coverage and claims can be challenging, can be frustrating for all of us. But the results of these two surveys highlight the massive opportunity we have to mind the gap.

You know, I doubt I could ace a quiz on modern lingo, and some of my staff—some of them are actually wearing the Connecticut Insurance Department T-shirts, so you can recognize them—but some of my staff might accuse me of being “cringe” if I tried working it in today, but our message, our message of hope and help transcends generational boundaries.

And that is what the NAIC strove to do on July 22, when I conducted my first satellite media tour of the year. I went to spread the word on how us, how state insurance departments and the NAIC can assist consumers and demystify the insurance process for everyone. The Gen Z survey helped set the stage for the satellite media tour.

It was a long day. Fueled by a passion for the work and the power of several cups of coffee—numerous cups of coffee at the beginning—I spoke to nine television, nine radio outlets from very early in the morning until early afternoon, and I’ve since added other interviews for a total audience reach so far of nearly 16 million. That’s 16 million people who have heard about what the NAIC and state insurance regulators, what we together are doing to help consumers.

And that tour was only one of the efforts we’ve undertaken to mind the gap in what has been a packed six months for the NAIC since our last national meeting.

Back when we met in Phoenix in March, we had just launched the state-led Property & Casualty Market Intelligence, the PCMI—you know, we love the abbreviations—PCMI Data Call. It’s a first-of-its-kind, multi-state project to add granular data on the availability and affordability of homeowners insurance for consumers to the already-robust financial data on solvency and investments that we have.

The PCMI data call asked insurance companies to submit data on more than 70 data points at a ZIP-code level, and that includes information on premiums, policies, claims, losses, limits, deductibles, nonrenewals, coverage types, and more.

We’ve got lots of data now, and it’s still undergoing review. But that information and the analysis will help us tell the story of what is happening across our nation in terms of the homeowners insurance market. The findings will enhance our regulatory, our regulatory capability to assess market concentrations and competitiveness, to identify potential coverage gaps, and to determine where to focus our mitigation and resilience efforts. It is important work.

And I want to say thank you again to Arkansas Insurance Commissioner Alan McClain and the Property and Casualty Insurance Committee and the leadership group that has worked on this for your diligence and dedication in support of state insurance regulators’ leadership on this critical issue.

Separately, by the way, we have a treasure trove of state data on homeowners insurance in the MCAS, the Market Conduct Annual Statement, and together with the information from the PCMI data call and some third-party data sets, we will be able to provide a far more comprehensive picture of our property insurance markets than anyone else, than anyone else, including the federal government.

In April, continuing our work to protect consumers and property markets, we unveiled the NAIC’s first-ever National Climate Resilience Strategy for Insurance, and that brought together insight and approaches from U.S. insurance regulators representing jurisdictions that are large and small, coastal and inland, urban and rural, as well as island jurisdictions.

That strategy, and if you go to naic.org you can find it, it is driven by data. It prioritizes pre-disaster mitigation, and it formalizes five resilience actions that can be coordinated by the NAIC both before and after disaster strikes.

My thanks again to our Climate and Resiliency Task Force co-chairs, Alaska Division of Insurance Director Lori Wing-Heier and the California Insurance Commissioner, Ricardo Lara, for their tireless efforts in creating the strategy and guiding it to adoption.

The month of May brought progress in minding the gap on both the domestic and international fronts. We held two of our annual signature events. Our International Insurance Forum and our Commissioner D.C. Fly-In each enabled us to shine a light on critical issues and advance discussions key to achieving long-term solutions.

You may have heard me say this before, but I do think it’s worth bragging again.

Thanks to the great work by the NAIC staff, our International Forum sold out just six days after we opened registration. Kept asking them to try to find some more space, and we actually were able to move the room around, fit in a few more people. So, we had a total of 250 attendees, representing 18 countries.

Speakers from six continents joined us for an event that embraced the “mind the gap” theme and featured topics such as climate risk; cyber; artificial intelligence; property insurance costs and access; the investment landscape; and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Because collaboration is at the heart of the NAIC’s mission stateside, working with our international counterparts is essential, as well, as these issues defy borders.

So, over the past and the recent past, in addition to the Forum, we have participated in almost 30 outreach calls, bilateral meetings, and events held by other organizations so far in 2024. And that does not include the numerous IAIS meetings our representatives have joined over the past seven months. And we expect the rest of the year to be at least as busy.

Of course, one of the international projects foremost in our minds is—we keep saying right now, this year—is the comparability assessment for the Aggregation Method. Over the coming weeks and months, the IAIS will be considering the analysis done on comparability, and that all reflects years of time and effort by IAIS members, by the Secretariat, and the volunteer companies, who so kindly shared their data in order to enable this project to go forward for the good of all. We do believe that the end result of this process should show that the Aggregation Method provides comparable outcomes to the Insurance Capital Standard. And this project will conclude at year-end, and the future focus at the IAIS, then, will shift toward implementation, with the Aggregation Method becoming the U.S. implementation of the Insurance Capital Standard.

We were back in D.C. not long after the Forum for the Commissioners’ Fly-In, and we had more than 150 Capitol Hill meetings with various legislators. Thirty-eight percent of those were with a regulator’s member of Congress, and that marks an 11 percent increase from 2023.

Those were jam-packed meetings. Regulators discussed numerous issues with our congressional representatives in the District, including:

• Strengthening property insurance markets and enhancing mitigation and resilience efforts
• One we’ve asked for on numerous occasions: giving state insurance regulators voting membership on FSOC, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, where this industry is the only industry that does not have its primary regulator having voting rights
• Protecting seniors from financial abuse, because we all get the calls, and we all know there are areas where the federal government has reserved power, and we could help, and we need to be able to do that.
• Clarifying the authority of the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As you know, that was not meant to cover insurance, and we will continue to re-say that.
• Protecting policyholders when insurers fail
• Fighting improper health insurance marketing
• Funding state health grants
• And opposing federal preemption of state data privacy, cyber, and artificial intelligence protections
• And, finally, we wanted to make sure that the consumer protections we fought so hard for in property insurance that we put into place are not undermined by expanded risk retention groups.

Now, after that successful International Forum and Fly-In, we gathered in the NAIC’s home base of Kansas City, Missouri, where Director Lindley-Myers was our host in June, and we had our fourth annual DE&I Conference. Evelyn Boswell led that so well. That, too, was a standing-room-only occasion. There were 480 in-person attendees. There wasn’t room for any more; I can tell you that. Another 301 were watching virtually, and they had engaging speakers and an action-oriented theme of “Stand Up! Speak Out!”

Now, one interesting little sidebar is that this year’s edition also included a new feature, if you weren’t there. It’s a pet sensory room, and that proved to be an especially big hit. I mean go figure, who knew?

As I share all of this good news—that’s not all the good news that we have here—I do want to congratulate the departments of insurance in Florida, Georgia, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Utah for meeting the NAIC’s Accreditation Program requirements. As you know, that’s central to our national system of state-based regulation. About an hour ago, the NAIC’s F Committee, shared by Director Wing-Heir, the Financial Regulation Standards and Accreditation Committee, announced that these states have undergone a comprehensive, independent review, resulting in the states meeting financial solvency oversight standards and receiving accreditation for the next five years. And for those five states, I want to say congratulations!

There is more, and I want to recognize the Interstate Insurance Product Regulation Commission on welcoming its 44^th member in July: the right Dakota, South Dakota.

This followed, by the way—and this was a moving moment for so many of us who were there—this followed the Compact’s presenting of its first-ever Compact Champion Award in June to the outgoing Commission Chair, Kathleen Birrane, as she stepped down from her role as Maryland insurance commissioner. The Compact Champion Award recognizes members for their distinguished service to and stewardship of the Insurance Compact. And for those who know the work that Kathleen put in, not just on the Compact but all the way around, that was such a well-deserved award.

So, that’s a quick look back, but I guess we also have to look ahead. A look at our agenda this week will tell you that we have no intention of slowing down.

It is also obvious that the feeling of uncertainty we all likely experienced as younger adults was not confined to our first taste of being responsible for ourselves. The headwinds we face every day, whether in our role as state insurance regulators or as leaders in our communities, are strong.

But national meetings like this provide momentum to propel us forward to positive solutions. There is so much that we have to ponder. How do we best help consumers and our insurance marketplaces withstand the risks of today and plan for those that will come tomorrow? How do we lean into the human side of our mission as state insurance regulators?

Responding to those questions showcases our state insurance regulatory system at its collaborative best. And I emphasize “collaborative” here, because we work together, as states, enabling innovation for the good of the nation, for the good of consumers.

So, I hope you will share my confidence in what is possible as you look around this room and see that while there is no shortage of challenges big and small, you never have to face them alone.

Thank you, and this officially concludes our opening session. We are adjourned.