Way back in 2008, the staff at the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission recommended abolishing Texas’ Office of Public Insurance Counsel, and transferring many of it functions to the Texas Department of insurance in order to “enhance the consumer perspective in the Department’s overall regulation of insurance by bringing consumer representation inside the Department’s review processes and consumer protection activities.”
We noted at the time, “This idea is laudable, but it misses the point.” We went on to recommend the abolishment of OPIC and its functions, because “[r]ather than inject a consumer representative into the regulatory process, the goal should be to reform the regulatory process, so that it is entirely consumer-focused.”
Neither OPIC or its functions were ultimately eliminated through the Sunset process. Now, having survived that brush with death, OPIC appears to have recovered well enough to be advertising. The image below is a recent Texas Tribune email in which OPIC proclaims it is “Advocating for You.”
One problem with this is that if we’d reform the way Texas regulates property insurance by eliminating price controls consumers wouldn’t need an advocate to work their way through TDI’s regulatory maze, they could simply cancel their insurance policy and buy a better one at a lower price.
The more direct problem, however, is that in between two multi-billion dollar budget shortfalls, OPIC has managed to gather enough money from Texans to pay for an advertising campaign. It received more than $2 million this biennium in overall funding, most of it from General Revenue. Consumers are being forced to pay OPIC to advocate for them and advertise that fact, just in case anyone missed it.
Perhaps instead we might revisit the idea of abolishing OPIC, revamping TDI’s regulatory process, and using the $2 million in savings as a start toward paying down a projected $10 billion plus shortfall for the 2014-15 biennium.
-Bill Peacock