RALEIGH – With a smorgasbord of electoral politics to choose from this year, how many North Carolina voters will notice the little tubs of finger food off in the corner marked “Council of State”? Not many, I fear, but they’ll be missing some tasty fare.
Take the race for state insurance commissioner. Longtime Democratic incumbent Jim Long head-faked to try to clear the field for one of his assistant commissioners, former Rep. Wayne Goodwin. At the last minute, Long announced that he was retiring and then personally escorted Goodwin to the State Board of Elections for the filing. Later, he endorsed Goodwin at a Council of State meeting, attempting to bestow his political mantle on his heir in a manner reminiscent of some abdicating feudal monarch.
Goodwin got a primary challenger, anyway – David Smith, a lawyer who once worked on health policy for former Lt. Gov. Dennis Wicker and more recently was elected the incoming president of the North Carolina Health Underwriters Association. Goodwin says that Smith’s ties to the insurance industry would make him like the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse. Smith says that Goodwin doesn’t understand the insurance industry and speaks out of both sides of his mouth.
Not spicy enough for you to want to nibble on, yet? At a recent debate hosted by the Insurance Federation of NC and webcast by N.C. FREE, the two Democratic candidates were asked what they would do to increase access to affordable health insurance. Smith argued for expanding Medicaid and S-CHIP, promoting wellness programs, and helping small business set up insurance pools. The goal, he said, is to extend insurance affordability to everyone while seeking cost containment.
Goodwin said that last phrase smacked of “socialism or communism.” He also said that while health policy was an important topic, the General Assembly had limited the insurance department’s power to address it, giving the elected commissioner more of a “bully pulpit” role – and, Goodwin added, Smith’s comments at the forum fulfilled the “bullying” part.
Smith, for his part, said he was “unashamed” of his role in the underwriters association and his professional involvement with insurance companies over the years. He said his experience made him the best candidate, and criticized Goodwin for being ignorant of health-policy details. Goodwin retorted that Smith didn’t seem to appreciate the insurance commissioner’s important role as state fire marshal.
And so it went, back and forth, almost certainly the most entertaining event about insurance ever held (though I hear the slapstick humor, juggling circles, and unicycle races one typically finds at actuary conventions are lots of fun, too).
There are, indeed, some serious issues plaguing North Carolina’s insurance markets, issues that Goodwin and Smith hashed out in some detail, and that Republican nominee and former Raleigh City Councilman John Odom also promises to delve into during the coming general-election campaign. They include the precarious state of the Beach Plan, which boosts insurance premiums for homeowners statewide to camouflage the risk of catastrophic weather-related losses for those (disproportionately wealthy) who buy coastal and riverside property; North Carolina’s wrongheaded policy of holding down the auto-insurance premiums of high-risk drivers by forcing everyone else to pay more to cover their risks; and a regulatory process for setting rates that Smith called “badly broken” and compares poorly to those used by most other states.
I’ve long believed that the state insurance commissioner, like most other Council of State posts, are to be appointed rather than elected. Even in the best of circumstances, it will be exceedingly difficult to get a significant number of North Carolina voters to notice the race long enough to learn the candidates’ names. But after watching the Goodwin-Smith smackdown, I’m starting to have second thoughts. Perhaps if we simply required all Council of State candidates to participate in at least six public forums, to be held at armories and county fairgrounds and including at last two rounds of no-holds-barred wrestling, we could elevate these races to cult status and earn enough in ticket sales to pay for the new public-financing system without ever having to resort to involuntary support from taxpayers.
I’m guessing Goodwin’s signature move might be the “Fire Marshal Rope Burn.” Smith’s specialty would be the “Underwriter Uppercut.”
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.