Philip Hart

  • Philip A. Hart (D-MI)
    • 1959-1976 - US Senate
  • When an issue begins is sometimes difficult to discern.
    • This particular issue may be traced to an address to the American Life Convention Annual Meeting in 1968.
    • The late Senator Hart advised the insurance industry that it should improve cost disclosure.
    • Senator Hart had become somewhat frustrated when the Veterans Administration had told him that they could not advise veterans as to which policies might be attractively priced for conversion of GI insurance.

--  Norman K. Martin

1981 - SOA - Individual Life Insurance Cost Disclosure Issues, Society of Actuaries - 22p

  • .....American consumers pay a bill without having more than a somewhat vague idea of what they are buying.
  • If this were the result of flimflam, enforcement agencies would have been all over the sellers years ago.
    • But this is not intentional flimflam it is as the man in "Fiddler on the Roof” explained away so many things— "tradition."  (p1)

--  Senator Philip Hart (D-MI)

1973 0220 - GOV (Senate) - The Life Insurance Industry, Part 1 of 4, Philip Hart (D-MI)  ---  [BonkNote-Part 1 of 4] 

  • One point should be mentioned that, from a research point of view, does tie together the proposed NAIC recommendation and the Hart subcommittee activities.
    • That is the data bank that Senator Hart and his staff have accumulated, and may choose to add to, by questionnaire.
      • The NAIC-drafted proposal envisions that the Hart data bank will be available for calculations and analyses in order to accomplish some of the research projects in their proposal.
    • Should the Society eventually be engaged in research regarding the various cost disclosure/cost comparison methods, it probably would be with the use of that bank of statistical data.

--   Bartley L. Munson

1973 - SOA - Price Disclosure and Cost Comparison, Society of Actuaries - 186p

  • The consumerists are having a fine time these days with the life insurance industry about which it seems there is nothing favorable to be said.
  • A distinguished member of the Senate* is agitating for a “truth in life insurance” law and this provoked the following comment from one newspaper:
    • “Probably what most insurance policies could use is a terse and lucid summary of precise coverage and options, enabling the purchaser to understand the benefits and recognize the limitations. . . .
    • (Senator) Hart* speaks of a possible ‘truth in life insurance’ law.
      • Our hunch is that the problem isn’t so much truth as clarity.”
    • Another doughty** champion*** of the consumer is reported to have said: “ . . . . it should surprise no one that the standard family auto policy is substantially less readable than Einstein’s basic work on relativity.”
      • The speaker*** is a lawyer and an insurance commissioner and he should be well aware that it is the lawyers and the insurance commissioners who have made the insurance policies what they are today.....
    • *Senator Philip Hart (D-MI)
    • **doughty = brave and persistent
    • *** Herb Denenberg, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner

1973 - SOA - The Actuary - Editorial by ACW (Andrew C. Webster), p2 - 8p