The Open Congress blog has had a few posts on movement on legislation that would address holes in the antitrust laws through which insurance companies happily pass. The most recent, I think, is this one on Sen. Reid’s appearance in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing:
Since 1945, the McCarran-Ferguson Act has given the states the authority to regulate insurance companies rather than the federal government. The law also stipulates that if the companies are regulated by the states, they won’t be susceptible to federal anti-trust laws that ban anti-competitive, monopolistic practices like price fixing, bid rigging and dividing up markets amongst themselves.
In a rare appearance as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the issue, Reid said that repealing the companies’ anti-trust exemptions is “something that should have been done a long time ago”
