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April 27, 2016 at 02:24 PM
The other day, when I wrote about MetLife announcing plans to suspend sales of individual disability insurance (but not group disability products or worksite disability products) in September, that was because a kind Twitter friend, Henry Stern of InsureBlog, tipped me off.
Stern, a longtime agent, tipped me off because he was getting emails about MetLife getting out of individual disability, and that made him a little sad.
Even though MetLife helped invent modern disability insurance, and pushed for nice little public health measures such as preventing tuberculosis by pasteurizing milk, it hasn’t always been a major player in the individual disability market.
An executive from the company bragged about the company mostly sitting on the sidelines in that market in the 1980s and early 1990s, when underwriting and pricing were going haywire. Stern speculated that MetLife may have gotten out of the individual market partly because it simply had an easier time competing in the group disability market.
But one major reason MetLife is pruning that particular non-core operation is that the federal government has been trying to classify the company as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI).
The SIFI designation may or may not stick, and reasonable people might have different views about whether and how the government should go about keeping financial institutions from becoming “too big to fail.”
