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Transparently Opaque: Understanding The Lack Of Transparency In Insurance Consumer Protection, Daniel Schwarcz

Daniel Benjamin Schwarcz

Consumer protection in most domains of financial regulation centers on transparency. Broadly construed, transparency involves making relevant information available to consumers as well as others who might act on their behalf, such as academics, journalists, newspapers, consumer organizations or other market watchdogs. By contrast, command and control regulation that affirmatively limits financial firms’ products or pricing is relatively uncommon in financial regulation. This Article describes a remarkable inversion of this pattern: while state insurance regulation frequently employs aggressive command and control consumer protection regulation, it typically does little or nothing to promote transparent markets. Rather, state lawmakers routinely either completely …