Reform the NAIC, don’t replace it with another Washington bureaucracy
I keep coming back to the irony that the NAIC was created precisely to keep insurance regulation out of Washington, and now the pressure to federalize comes from the fact that it works so quietly that hardly anyone knows it exists. That invisibility is a real problem. When a body sets model laws that states then adopt nearly word for word, it wields enormous power, yet it operates with the public profile of a trade association.
What I'd want to know is whether the reforms being proposed actually address the accountability gap or just rearrange the furniture. A few more open meetings and a clearer public comment process would help, but the deeper issue is that the NAIC's funding comes largely from industry fees. That creates an appearance problem no procedural tweak fully fixes.
Still, I lean toward the reform path over a federal regulator. Moving insurance oversight to Washington would trade one set of problems for another, adding a layer of bureaucracy that would still depend on state data. The better question might be why the NAIC hasn't already adopted these changes on its own, because the fact that it hasn't tells you something about how much pressure it actually feels.