LIVE from Big Sky, Tackling Insurance Costs with National Leaders

Montana State Auditor James Brown (R-MT) served as host for insurance commissioners from all across the country in meetings that kicked off Tuesday in Big Sky.

We got the chance to join Brown and other commissioners from across our region, including the President of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), North Dakota's own Jon Godfread.

One topic we wanted to cover is wildfire policies and how challenges in states like California can lead to higher home insurance rates here in Montana.

As we were talking, Utah's Insurance Commissioner, Jonathan Pike, talked about how two new fires had already cropped up in his home state of Utah near his town of St. George.

Here's what Dean Cameron, the Director of the Idaho Department of Insurance, had to say:

Dean Cameron: "Every insurance company, they're looking at it from a profitability standpoint. And so even though we don't want California fires to impact us- when they lost a bunch of money in California, it impacts us. We are getting every day insurance companies calling us trying to decide if they're going to stay in Idaho. If they're going to stay marketing in Idaho. And we know that...

Aaron Flint: "Because we don't have the population"

Dean Cameron: "A, because we don't have the population, and we still have the risk. So we have, we have the concern. We had 91 companies in Idaho in 2023. That went down by 24 companies over this last year."

He tied a lot of it back to the inflation increases over the past 4 years and the increased home prices on top of wildfire risks.

Another very interesting angle to the show was the international ownership and international pressure interfering with our US insurance markets.

NAIC President Jon Godfread noted how a lot of power and ownership for these insurance companies is based in Europe right now.

President Godfread: "The United States makes up about half of the world's insurance market. So having us at the table is not only critically important, but it's critically important for us so they don't start pulling us in different directions that maybe we don't want to go...I'll tell you, we've been fighting that fight at the international stage for a number of years because they want to pull us into more of a bank style, centric, regulatory scheme, because that's what they understand. And we're sitting there saying, no, no, you've decimated your life insurance industry. You've decimated a lot of your insurance industries in Europe and other places. That's not a good model. We want to follow."

Here's the full audio of our show from the NAIC meetings in Big Sky: