Dodd-Frank Is Obamacare for Non-Health Insurance

“If you like your life, home, and auto insurance, you can keep them.”

President Obama didn’t make this promise when he signed into law the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul on July 21, 2010, as he did regarding the health insurance law – Obamacare – that he signed into law a few months earlier that year. But as syndicated columnist Jay Ambrose points out, “if the Dodd-Frank regulatory law does what is now plotted, though he will still share responsibility for the insurance provision that, along with others, could bloody lots of noses.”

As Dodd-Frank approaches its fourth anniversary, Obama is singing its praises. He told National Public Radio on July 2 that Dodd-Frank is “an unfinished piece of business, but that doesn't detract from the important stabilization functions” it has provided

Yet even to lawmakers from Obama’s own party, this “financial reform” legislation is looking more and more like a destabilizing force – much like the so-called “reform” of health insurance. Even at the outset, there were many similarities. Both Obamacare and Dodd-Frank contained about 2,500 pages that were rammed through a Democrat-controlled House and Senate at breakneck speed. Because of the length of the law and speed of passage, many did not understand and/or hadn’t read the bills.

Also as with Obamacare, unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank almost immediately began to surface. First, there was a sharp reduction in free checking due to the price controls on debit card transactions from the Durbin Amendment. Then, community banks and credit unions – including some with close to zero foreclosures – found the “qualified mortgage” rules so costly and complex that they slowed down or stopped altogether the issuance of new mortgages. Then, with regard to a provision with no plausible connection to sound banking and finance, domestic manufacturers found themselves having to trace back numerous materials they utilize to determine if they had originated as “conflict minerals” from the Congo.

But the latest unintended consequence may be the one that bears the most striking similarity to Obamacare. Just as health insurance premiums and deductibles skyrocketed due to Obamacare’s many mandates, so too may those of life, home and car insurance due to provisions of Dodd-Frank. Life insurance rates alone could soar by $5 billion to $8 billion a year, according to the respected economic consulting firm Oliver Wyman. And as with Obamacare, choices of policies will be more limited and some policies may even be canceled.

The good news is that amazingly, the Democrat-controlled Senate, perhaps chastened by the experience of Obamacare, passed a bipartisan bill last month to attempt to provide relief from these Dodd-Frank provisions. The House should pass identical legislation, dare Obama to veto it, and then push for more.

It has been said that under Obamacare, health insurance companies are no longer insurance companies, but public utilities. With Dodd-Frank, many insurance companies face regulation as if they were banks. Under the Federal Reserve’s interpretation of the Collins Amendment, sponsored by liberal Republican Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), insurance companies with a small thrift — or even without any banking component but deemed “systemically important” by Dodd-Frank’s Financial Stability Oversight Council – will face the same capital standards as those of banks.

This is despite the fact that there is widespread bipartisan consensus that doing so is insane. While both banks and insurers face risks, they utilize very different business models. Typically, banks make short-term payouts on deposits for millions of customers. Insurers, by contrast, either pay claims for just a fraction of policyholders, or in the case of life insurance, pay out after years or decades.

Consequently, insurance firms, with the oversight of state regulators, have designed portfolios that contain high-quality corporate bonds and some blue-chip stocks to build up reserves in the event of a catastrophic loss. Yet banks, with primary assets of loans, are limited to a small number of corporate bonds and virtually no stocks to meet their capital requirements.

Applying bank-centric capital standards to insurance companies would massively increase costs. The Oliver Wyman study found that imposing these rules on insurers would raise costs for life insurance consumers by $5 billion to $8 billion. These costs could hit policy holders both through higher premiums and reduced benefits. And some policies simply could become unavailable as insurers “exit certain product lines,” the study found.

Yet ironically, such bank-like standards would also likely heighten risks instead of making insurers safer, according to risk management professionals. A letter to Congress from the American Academy of Actuaries warns that forcing insurers to follow bank capital rules both “assigns risks to insurers that are not necessarily significant to them” and “understates risks that may be more significant to insurers than to entities such as banks.”

So who is it who thinks it’s a good idea to apply bank capital rules to insurance companies? Virtually no one. Take Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who would never be mistaken for a deregulator. “I want strong capital standards, but they have to make sense,” Brown said. “Applying bank standards to insurers could make the financial system riskier, not safer.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen doesn’t seem to disagree, but says the language of Dodd-Frank’s Collins Amendment ties the Fed’s hands. “The Collins Amendment does restrict what is possible for the Federal Reserve in designing an appropriate set of rules,” Yellen said at a Senate hearing.

For her part, Collins, one of three Senate Republicans to vote for-Dodd-Frank, says her provision has been misinterpreted. “Since I am the author of the Collins amendment, since I am Senator Collins, I think I know what I meant,” she stated at a Senate hearing n March.

Hopefully, next time a behemoth piece of legislation is being rushed onto the Senate floor, Collins, Brown and others will not pass this bill before they know what’s in it, or how any loose language might be interpreted by regulators. That may be too much to hope for, but to their credit, and to the rarely deserved credit of everyone in the U.S. Senate, a corrective bill passed that body by unanimous consent on June 3.

Co-sponsored by everyone from Brown and Collins to conservative Sens. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the Insurance Capital Standards Clarification Act of 2014 (S. 2270), revises Dodd-Frank to make it clear that the Collins Amendment does not apply bank capital rules to insurance firms. No one – not Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) nor Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) – objected to the measure when it hit the Senate Floor.

Now the ball is clearly in the House’s court as the unhappy Dodd-Frank anniversary approaches. Its first step is simple: Spoil the euphoric leftist Dodd-Frank anniversary party by passing the Senate bill exactly as written. Obama will then have two politically unpleasant choices. He can either sign this bipartisan bill highlighting Dodd-Frank’s failure or try to stand firmly in shifting sand and watch his usual allies help override the veto. Either way, much of what little luster there is from Dodd-Frank will be rightfully gone.

Then we can move on to repealing the many misguided sections of Dodd-Frank that shower Main Street with mandates and further entrench Fannie, Freddie, and other institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Four years after Dodd-Frank, it’s time for authentic free-market financial reform that lifts barriers to competition and ends bailouts.