New Consumer Advisory Panel Planned

A new, seven-member consumer advisory panel will be set up within the state Department of Insurance and, unlike the first panel, this one will have a majority of consumer members, the state’s insurance commissioner said.

Insurance Commissioner Roxani M. Gillespie, in a letter to a wide range of parties interested in insurance issues, asked for suggestions on possible members and said she intends to name the members in January.

The insurance commissioner said the new panel will have at least four consumers and probably two representatives of the insurance industry. The new chief of the department’s consumer affairs division, Jim Miller, will be the seventh member. Gillespie said it will meet at least quarterly to advise the department.

The first advisory panel, composed of 11 members, had been named April 16, 1986. It came under immediate fire from consumer groups because a majority of its members were either government officials or insurance sellers.

However, the first panel ultimately came to include one of the most outspoken critics of the Insurance Department, Steven Miller, head of the Insurance Consumer Action Network.

Gillespie, who quietly suspended and then disbanded the first panel without public announcement, said she has decided not to appoint Steven Miller to the new panel because she considers him a lobbyist.

“The problem with the other panel is that it turned into part of a lobbying effort,” she said. “We had one lobbyist there, and we had requests for others. . . . Clay Jackson (a major insurance lobbyist) and Steve Miller belong in Sacramento. That’s not what the panel should be about.”

Miller, however, said that he is not a lobbyist, that he is not required to register as one because he is not paid by anyone to represent them.

“She does not grasp the distinction between those representing the public interest and those paid to represent special interests,” Miller declared of Gillespie. He called her decision to exclude him from the new panel merely a rationalization.

Gillespie said: “What we’re trying to do this time is correct errors. The new panel will be a standing process within the Department of Insurance, not something that would come and go.”