The 2007-2008 legislative session will bring a heftier lobbying bill for some insurance organizations, according to the Secretary of State’s record as of July 1: Some groups have already outspent the 2005-2006 session, while others are on track to do the same when end-of-the-year totals come in.
They spent their cash on issues like managed competition in auto insurance, coastal homeowners insurance, auto body repair and gender-based pricing on annuities and life insurance.
The costs are adding up, even without taking into account the furious legislative activity of July, when lawmakers were rushing to beat a July 31 deadline on many bills.
Huge amounts of money get spent in July, and insurance industry activity gets especially heated because it is so heavily regulated in Massachusetts, said Pamela Wilmot, executive director of lobbying watchdog group Common Cause Massachusetts.
“It gets busy late in the game,” agreed Brianne Mallaghan, a spokeswoman with the Boston office of the American Insurance Assoc., a property/casualty group. Mallaghan said the AIA was especially involved in this session’s legislation relating to coastal property and auto body repair, for which they spent $113,000 so far on lobbyist salaries.
Property issues, such as the fight against managed competition in auto insurance, spurred big jumps in spending. Commerce Insur-ance, a major Massachusetts car insurer and already a big spender, had the biggest jump: $1.3 million this session versus $764,000 in the last.
Buy The Numbers
AIG, which sells both property and life insurance, spent about $257,000 this session – about $105,000 more than in 2005-2006 – dis-patching lobbyists to plead the corporate behemoth’s case on worker’s compensation, identify theft, retirement benefits bills and more. Plymouth Rock Assurance, another major regional auto insurer, spent $115,000 thus far this session, compared to $100,000 from 2005-2006.
Notably, property/casualty insurer OneBeacon spent substantially less, cashing out only about $210,500 this session versus about $381,000 last session. Other property insurers, such as Liberty Mutual and Premier, look to have kept their spending roughly in line with last sessions’ totals.
Life insurance groups were also generally cooler in their spending: ING Americas Insurance Holdings are at a modest $63,000 this year, versus $80,500 from the previous session.
No Show
MassMutual, for its part, didn’t even show up to the party this session, after spending more than half a million in lobbyist salaries during 2005-2006 plus about $68,000 in campaign contributions.
The Life Insurance Association of Massachusetts was only at $412,500 this session, versus $600,000 previously, although the group’s president, Andrew Calamare, spent nearly $36,000 in campaign contributions so far this year.
Calamare said his group spent a lot of its efforts opposing a bill that will require insurers to blend pricing of annuities to make them less expensive for women – currently, annuities cost more for women because they tend to live longer, and thus get a bigger payout. The bill, which passed, will require a blending of those two rates, making insurers ignore actuarial principles to make the rates more equitable between genders.
Savings Bank Life Insurance fought a similar battle, supporting a bill that would have allowed it to raise prices for women’s life insur-ance, explaining the company’s increased lobbying expenses this year. Unlike most life insurance organizations, SBLI’s lobbying costs rose from $147,000 this session versus just $35,000 last time.
