The agency that is starting to convert the Kampo Japanese life insurance program into a private company should take another look at Japan’s postal privatization laws, according to 8 North American and European trade groups.
Officials at the groups write about Kampo privatization in a letter sent to Japan’s Postal Privatization Commission.
The commission recently released a collection of “findings” regarding new business operations by the Postal Insurance Corp., the company that would replace the current Kampo system.
Kampo now controls about 40% of Japan’s life market, in part because it receives many hidden and explicit government subsidies, opponents of the current system say.
A list of basic principles in Japan’s postal privatization law “requires Japan to implement measures to ensure equivalent conditions of competition [between the privatized entities] and other companies engaged in like business organizations,” coalition officials write in the letter. “Unfortunately, the commission, in its findings, has chosen to substantially ignore this key global best practice…conspicuously absent are any references to the ‘equal competitive conditions.’”
Efforts to privatize Kampo without creating fair market rules would help Japanese consumers as well as competing insurers, coalition officials write.