Consumer Connections (D) Working Group
Consumer Connections (D) Working Group Page
Joint Executive (EX) / Plenary Committee Summary Report
Fall 2009 Meeting Summaries Index

The Consumer Connections (D) Working Group met Sept. 22, 2009. During this meeting, the Working Group:

• Adopted its Aug. 8 conference call minutes.

• Received a report on the Wisconsin Insurance Contract Readability Project. The discussion focused on best practices for increasing consumer knowledge and understanding of insurance-contract provisions when purchasing or utilizing coverage. Readability scoring and consumer disclosures were discussed as tools that could increase or limit consumer understanding, depending on how the contracts or disclosures are written. The Working Group recommended that a project team be formed to look into whether it needs to draft a “plain English language” best-practices requirement for insurance contracts.

• Discussed the autism coverage/mandates survey. The Working Group recommended that future versions of the survey be made public.

• Discussed the Insurance Consumer Affairs Exchange’s (ICAE) Complaint Data Analysis Position Paper. Discussion focused on market regulation accreditation and that the use of complaint data in market analysis by regulators has increased, as have consumer requests to the states to disclose their complaint data analyses. The Working Group recommended that the ICAE paper be sent to the Special Accreditation Standards Working Group and the Market Regulation and Consumer Affairs Committee for consideration.

• Discussed next steps based on the results of the complaint reconciliation survey. Discussion focused on uniformity and the need for a best-practices process that could provide consistency from state to state. The Working Group recommended that this issue be sent to the Special Accreditation Standards Working Group and the Market Regulation and Consumer Affairs Committee for consideration. 

• Received an update from the project group that is drafting verbiage revisions to the detail definitions on the Consumer Information Source (CIS) Web site.