Ben Nelson to leave top NAIC post

Nelson succeeded Terri Vaughan, who left the NAIC CEO post to became dean of the business school at Drake University.

The NAIC is a group for insurance regulators. It does not directly create laws or regulations, but it develops model documents that often serve as templates for the insurance laws and regulations states do create. In some cases, state or federal laws allow for the automatic adoption of new or revised NAIC standards.

While Nelson was the CEO of the NAIC, NAIC teams fleshed out the models used to establish and run the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) public exchange system, and to implement PPACA commercial health insurance product design and underwriting rules.

Nelson was more visible in NAIC efforts to shape implementation of the insurance-related provisions included in the Dodd-Frank Act, including the provisions that created the U.S. Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO) and gave the FIO a role in representing the U.S. insurance industry in international affairs. He has often spoken out against the idea of applying bank-based rules to insurers without fully accounting for the differences between banks and insurers.