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Insurance Regulation Shifting Toward Managed Care Agency

The regulation of health insurance in California is shifting dramatically toward the Department of Managed Health Care, whose share of the commercial market has mushroomed in recent years.

The change has come at the expense of the other agency in the state’s unusual bifurcated system, the California Department of Insurance, whose authority over commercial health plans plummeted from 20 percent of the market to about 12 percent between 2012 and 2014 — the most recent data available.

For a variety of reasons, the shrinking of the insurance department’s responsibilities is likely to continue, according to Katherine Wilson, CEO of Wilson Analytics, a health care consulting firm based in San Francisco.

“It’s a huge shift, particularly in the individual market,” Wilson said. “And the change in the small-group market is huge too, just not as big.”

In 2012, the insurance department regulated 71 percent of the individual market; by the end of 2014, that figure had plunged to just 18 percent.

California is the only state in the U.S. with dual health insurance regulators.

Critics of the state’s divided approach note that it dilutes regulatory power by giving the insurance companies a wedge between the two agencies and creating needless inefficiencies as health care and how it’s paid for become increasingly complex.

“This dual structure contributes to consumer confusion, government and insurance carrier administrative burdens, and difficulty in monitoring what is being bought and sold in the insurance marketplace,” according to a 2011 paper by the Kelch Policy Group, published by the California Health Care Foundation (California Healthline is an editorially independent program of the Foundation).

It also complicates the taxation of insurance companies:  taxes on health plans regulated by the managed care agency  are lower in many cases than they’d be if the same health plans were governed by the insurance department — an issue that is wending its way through state courts.

The Department of Insurance, led by Commissioner Dave Jones, has authority over old-fashioned indemnity plans and some PPOs. The managed care agency traditionally regulates HMOs, but recently it has picked up some types of PPOs.

That has blurred the regulatory line between the two agencies. Perhaps more important, it has allowed some insurance companies the flexibility to essentially choose their regulator in many cases.

That is a contributing factor in the shift of health plan supervision away from the insurance department.

Health insurers have said that consolidating policies under DMHC’s jurisdiction is more about achieving operational efficiencies and that the regulatory requirements are just as rigorous as insurance department rules.

But it’s also the case that some insurers feel uncomfortable with Jones, who is an elected politician with ambitions for higher office and does not shy away from public confrontation with the industry -– though as the data show, his influence over insurance companies is contracting.

Shelley Rouillard, appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, has been director of the managed-care agency since December 2013. She has pursued several high-profile enforcement cases against health plans, including the failure to provide adequate mental-health treatment and giving patients inaccurate provider directories.

Neither agency, however, has the power to stop insurers from raising premiums, no matter how large the increases.

Legislative efforts have been made to change the regulatory structure. Last session, for example, Assembly member Kevin McCarty introduced a bill that would have put all PPO insurance products under purview of the Department of Insurance.

That proposal went nowhere, but it is a two-year bill so it could return during the current legislative session.

More likely, the Department of Managed Health Care will continue to assume a growing regulatory role, Wilson said.

Over the years, there have been calls to end California’s bifurcated health insurance regulation, but if the trend continues it may resolve itself, she said. “It would be sort of a de facto single regulator.”

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