NC Insurance Commissioner

The exploits of North Carolina’s Insurance Commissioner as crime fighter have been well-documented on this site and in other places, including countless news accounts and the official website of the Department of Insurance.

And nobody seems to know where the attack came from:

Senator Katie Dorsett co-chairs the subcommittee that wrote that section of the budget. “I do not know where it originated. It came to our committee. We included it. And I was not aware of it."

One level up, the lead budget writers didn’t know much more about the provision than Dorsett or Atwater did. Garrou, Albertson, Swindell – no one could explain it. “I know that it was put in there to try to structure the insurance ratemaking the same way you would do with utilities and other things,” Swindell said. “But I’m not sure, on the dotted line, who it was that suggested that.”

I caught up with Wayne Goodwin this week and asked him about his campaign. I was specifically interested in how public financing worked for him. Both he and his opponent participated in public financing, so were on equal footing in that regard. The most obvious result of their participation is that insurance industry money was kept at a minimum in both campaigns reducing the appearance that those who are regulated by the office also hold influence over it.

This year the voters booted the insurance industry and its employees out of this campaign, not that the current or future office holders were or would have been influenced by their contributions in the first place.

The following is a bit of my Q & A with Commissioner-elect Goodwin: