The McCarran-Ferguson Act is the 1945 US statute that delegated the regulation of insurance to the states and exempted the business of insurance from most federal law where a state already regulates it. It is the reason the United States has no federal insurance regulator, fifty separate insurance departments, and nothing resembling PSD2, the CFPB's 1033 rule, or the 21st Century Cures Act for insurance data.
McCarran-Ferguson Act
McCarran-Ferguson is the most consequential regulation in this catalog that mandates nothing at all. It is an allocation of authority, and the allocation is why American insurance looks the way it does from the outside.
- Regulation delegated to the states - Insurance is regulated by fifty state departments, coordinated — not governed — by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
- A federal exemption, not a federal rule - Federal law generally yields where a state regulates the business of insurance, which forecloses the single-national-mandate path that opened banking and health data.
- No open-insurance rule anywhere in the stack - The CFPB’s 1033 rule opened consumer banking data; nothing equivalent touches an insurance policy.
- Coordination without compulsion - The NAIC can write model laws, and each state decides whether and how to adopt them. There is no mechanism to require a carrier to expose anything to anybody.
This is the law that makes US insurance the control group for every argument about mandates. Scoring seventy-nine
US insurance organizations for The State of US Insurance APIs found a sector averaging 29.4 with nothing reaching
the Strong band and exactly one company publishing bind as an operation. When people ask what an industry does
when nobody forces it to publish, this is the statute that set up the experiment, and that report is the
result.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This regulation shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this regulation in the context of a real sector.
The State of US Insurance APIs
The structural reason American insurance has fifty regulators, no federal insurance regulator, and no open-insurance rule — and therefore no API mandate to comply with, maliciously or otherwise.
Implemented by these standards
A regulation is the law; a standard is the machine-readable contract that makes it real. These are the technical standards that implement this regulation, catalogued at standards.apievangelist.com.
ACORD
With no federal rule to force a contract, data exchange fell to a private standards body — and stayed in an EDI idiom for fifty years.
