Legislation to make sure Georgia health insurance agents get a commission for all sales is back in play at the General Assembly, a year after media attention helped scuttle a similar bill.
State Rep. Shaw Blackmon, R-Bonaire, the sponsor of last year's bill, has made significant changes, such as not having Rules Committee Chairman John Meadows, R-Calhoun, as a co-sponsor.
It was the presence of Meadows, perhaps the second-most-powerful member of the House, as the second signer of the bill in 2016 that led The Atlanta Journal-Constitution to raise questions about whether the measure represented a conflict of interest. Meadows is an independent insurance agent who has long been licensed to sell health insurance.
While his name is no longer on the bill, his interest in it remains, lawmakers say.
And opponents of the measure say it still smacks of hypocrisy from a Republican Party that has long argued against government interference in businesses and for a free-market philosophy in legislating.
Blackmon said such criticism is unfair.
“We’re just not operating in a free market in the health care industry,” he said. “No industry is more heavily regulated in this day and time than health care.”
Besides not having Meadows’ name on the bill, Blackmon has nixed other provisions that caused him trouble a year ago, including a proposed minimum commission for agents.
House Bill 64 would require health insurance companies to pay agents a commission for every plan the agent sells or renews, but it does not specify an amount. Blackmon said because the Affordable Care Act requires all taxpayers to have health insurance, agents in small towns are handling more individual plans than before.
Insurance companies, he said, were not always paying commissions for those less profitable plans. The ACA mandated that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of the money they take in from premiums on health care costs and improving quality. The other 20 percent can go to administrative, overhead and marketing costs, and agents’ commissions, when they’re paid at all, are being cut as companies seek to keep most of that 20 percent.