North Carolina Primary Voters Pick Insurance Commissioner Nominees
What You Need to Know
Eleven states elect their insurance commissioners.
Five of them are voting on their commissioners this year.
California put a measure related to health insurance on the ballot.
North Carolina Republicans voted in a primary Tuesday to make Mike Causey, the state’s insurance commissioner, their general election commissioner candidate.
Democrats picked Natasha Marcus, a state senator, to be their commissioner candidate.
North Carolina is one of five states choosing elected insurance commissioners this year.
What it means: The insurance commissioner candidates might try to focus voter attention on insurance price increases.
Commissioner selection processes: Voters elect the insurance commissioners in 11 states.
Governors appoint the commissioners in 39 states.
In the District of Columbia, the mayor appoints the commissioner.
Mike Causey: Causey won his primary with 533,900 votes, or 60.59% of the votes cast, compared with 21.91% of the votes for Andrew Marcus (who has no known family relationship with Natasha Marcus) and 17.5% of the votes for C. Robert Brawley.
Causey has worked as an insurance agent and owned an insurance agency.
Causey has been a strong supporter of efforts to use an annuity sales standards update developed by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and based on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation Best Interest to ward off any SEC moves to regulate non-variable annuities or a U.S. Department of Labor proposal for imposing a fiduciary standard of care on anyone, including annuity sellers, who helps retirement savers with rollovers.
He describes himself as someone who puts people first and promotes bureaucratic reform. He contends that rigid regulation of auto insurance prices hurts consumers.
“North Carolina is the only remaining state with a Rate Bureau,” according to his campaign website. “Mike Causey is helping reform an antiquated bureaucracy that kills free enterprise and rewards bad drivers at the expense of good drivers.”
Natasha Marcus: Marcus won her primary with 503,449 votes, or 77.61% of the votes in her race.
David Wheeler, her opponent, received 22.39% of the votes.
Marcus is a lawyer from the Charlotte, North Carolina, area with no direct professional insurance experience. She is a member of the state Senate Commerce and Insurance Committee.
She has said that she will look out for state residents who need insurance “to ensure rates are fair, coverage is as-advertised and valid claims are paid,” according to her website.
She refers to Causey on the site as “Rate Hike Mike,” and she objects to his decisions not to hold public hearings on rate hike proposals.
