If you’ve been victimized by an insurance entity, you deserve your money back
The insurance commissioner can hold an insurance company or producer accountable if they violate the law by suspending their insurance license or issuing a fine. But if your company overcharges you or wrongfully takes your premium, we cannot make them give you your money back.
Senate Bill 5331 corrects this and allows us to order a company that violates the law to pay restitution to their victims.
Here’s how the proposed law would work:
- When an insurance company uses rates that are not approved, we don’t have a way to make them pay you back what you’ve overpaid.
- If an illegal health insurer defrauds policyholders, we can order them to stop their unlawful activity and fine them but we cannot order them to repay the money they took.
- If an insurance agent collects premiums but doesn’t forward that money to the insurance company — leaving the policyholder without coverage — we cannot require them to repay the money they took.
It’s about fairness
For most other entities we regulate, the limit is $10,000 per violation or offense. Our authority to fine property and casualty insurers — like home and auto insurance companies — is limited to $10,000, regardless of the number of violations.
We believe all insurers should be treated the same. This restitution bill allows us to penalize property and casualty insurers the same way we can penalize all other entities we regulate.