Insurance reform bill tackles systemic risk

MOMENTUM CONTINUES TO BUILD for some anatomy of federal allowance regulation, and that absolutely is a acceptable thing.

As we address on folio 1, Reps. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., and Ed Royce, R-Calif., accept alien a new—and, we believe, improved—version of the allowance authoritative ameliorate bill they alien in the aftermost Congress. That bill would accept accustomed insurers and producers to accept whether they would be adapted by accompaniment or federal authorities.

We say the National Allowance Consumer Protection Act is an advance because it takes into annual allotment of the acumen for the bread-and-butter agitation of the accomplished few months by removing the aspect of best for insurers accounted to be systemically important. Those insurers would be federally regulated, period.

And that's the way it should be. Anybody knows what happened to American International Group Inc. back authoritative blank bootless and, what Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke so memorably declared as a barrier armamentarium aloft of an insurer, about destroyed the basal allowance company. Such a bearings can never be accustomed to appear again.

By agreement some—and allowance are not actual many—insurance companies beneath a federal regulator who would alike with a abstracted systemic accident regulator, the affairs of addition AIG-type near-collapse should be abundantly diminished. That's a ambition anybody should support, and we accept a well-crafted federal authoritative anatomy is the best way to accomplish that.