CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS INSURANCE COMMISSIONER : Claims Should Be Paid Within 30 Days, Garamendi Says

State Sen. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove), diverging from what an opponent had branded “a non-campaign of silence and absence,” vowed Tuesday that if elected state insurance commissioner, he will institute a program requiring “insurers to pay claims as quickly as consumers must pay premiums.”

Garamendi said a 1973 law gives the commissioner authority to establish procedures under which insurers would have to pay valid claims within 30 days, the same period of time policyholders usually have to pay their bills.

The senator said that as commissioner he would provide computerized printouts to consumers comparing not only prices but how fast various insurers are paying claims.

Now that the campaign has only three weeks to run, Garamendi said in an interview, the voters will be paying more attention to the candidates and he intends to speak out more frequently about plans to make the commissioner’s office “the best consumer protection agency in the nation” and to enforce Proposition 103.

“I will change (outgoing Insurance Commissioner) Roxani Gillespie’s record of delay, stall, obstruct and delay some more on (implementing) 103,” he said.

Shortly before the senator spoke out, one of his opponents in the race for the Democratic nomination, Walter Zelman, charged at a Sacramento news conference that Garamendi’s campaign has made “a mockery of the democratic process.”

Accusing Garamendi of saying nothing and refusing to appear with the other candidates while concentrating on raising money from “special interest” political action groups, Zelman declared that “the ability of politicians to run issue-less campaigns while attempting to buy elections . . . is destroying the fabric of our politics and our democracy.”

Meanwhile, another Democratic candidate, Bill Press, renewed a challenge to Garamendi to join him in a one-on-one debate.

Garamendi, who has termed the crowded field in the Democratic race “a zoo,” said Tuesday that he fears the race “has degenerated into a discussion of who is close to or furthest away from the insurance industry” and that he has been falsely tagged as on the industry side.

“Clearly, I’m not on the side of the industry,” he said. But on some issues, such as limiting malpractice claims against doctors, he said the public interest coincides with that of the industry, and he will not be afraid to choose what is in the consumer’s interest, even if it opens him to charges of sometimes siding with insurers.

Accordingly, Garamendi said, he will not repudiate the recent endorsement of him by Michael J. Brady, an officer of an insurance company defense lawyers association. He noted that Brady, in a letter asking his colleagues to contribute to Garamendi, had acknowledged that whatever Garamendi did to keep California’s insurance industry healthy would be done in a way consistent with consumers’ interests.

Meanwhile, in the race for the Republican nomination, one of the candidates, Tom Skornia, criticized another, John Perise, for making plans to put more than $100,000 of his own money into two statewide slate mailers. In the poorly funded Republican primary, Skornia said he feared this could be decisive.

Perise, a trial lawyer, is the only one of five candidates for the GOP nomination to favor trial lawyer positions on insurance issues.