After a three-year battle, the Georgia House of Representatives has passed legislation to make sure insurance agents receive a commission for selling health coverage.
The legislation, House Bill 64, was passed in the final minutes of the 2018 session. It was a priority of House Rules Chairman John Meadows, an insurance agent who has maintained that some health insurers weren’t paying agents for the services they provided, according to a report by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Meadows tried to pass a similar bill setting a minimum commission for agents in 2016, but the legislation was scuttled after reporting by the AJC on the persistent issue of state lawmakers pushing bills to help their own professions.
Meadows was dropped as a co-sponsor of HB 64 last year, according to the AJC. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Shaw Blackmon, said the legislation would require health insurance companies to pay agents a commission in “many situations.” Unlike the previous bill, which set a minimum commission of 5%, HB 64 did not specify an amount.
Last year, Blackmon said that agents in small towns were handling more individual health plans than ever because of the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Insurance companies, however, weren’t always paying commissions for those less profitable plans, the AJC reported. The ACA mandated that insurance companies spend at least 80% of the money from premiums on healthcare costs and improving quality, so agents’ commissions – if they got paid at all – were being cut as insurers scrambled to keep as much of the remaining 20% as possible.
“The fact is, over the last few years, you have fewer and fewer health (insurance) agents due to the fact that they have a hard time doing a lot of work for very little return,” said state Sen. Burt Jones, the founder of an insurance business.
