Insurance Industry

Big health plans share Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's goal of trimming the ranks of the uninsured, but they have their own ideas about how to do it -- such as taxes on cigarettes and service charges on patients every time they visit a doctor. Perhaps not surprisingly, none would limit premiums to make insurance more affordable. Such details are likely to make it more difficult for Schwarzenegger to press his plan unveiled this month to offer everyone in California health insurance.

Citigroup Inc. decided it was better off without Sanford Weill's umbrella. The parent of Citibank said Tuesday that it would sell its red umbrella trademark to insurance company St. Paul Travelers Cos. and operate under the Citi brand name after failing to get most consumers to think of anything except insurance when they saw the 137-year-old symbol.

Consumer advocates who endorsed Steve Poizner for state insurance commissioner last fall are fuming about his first major policy advisor: a former insurance industry lobbyist. Poizner, a Republican who said during his campaign that he would make consumer protection his top priority, named William L. Gausewitz as counsel to the insurance commissioner, specializing in writing laws and regulations. Gausewitz starts next week at the Department of Insurance.

State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. said profit climbed 64% in 2006 as the Gulf Coast escaped hurricane damage. Net income rose to $5.32 billion from $3.24 billion in 2005, the Bloomington, Ill.-based company said. The company, which is owned by its policyholders, will pay a record $1.25-billion dividend to its auto customers, including $195 million in California.

Should your doctors' pay be based on how well they care for you? Health insurers, including the federally funded Medicare system, think so. They are making California a testing ground for standards that could eventually be used to rate all physicians in the country, rewarding them for keeping people healthy and costs down.

The board of California's largest insurer abruptly fired two top officials Tuesday as part of an ongoing investigation into the troubled state agency that provides workers' compensation insurance for 230,000 employers. The dismissals by the State Compensation Insurance Fund -- which included the agency's president -- were related in part to the fund's selling of discounted group policies to individual employers, said Jeanne Caine, chairwoman of the insurer's board.

Billionaire T. Boone Pickens is being credited with a novel -- some would say morbid -- financing plan that his fellow Oklahoma State University fans hope will lift their beloved Cowboys football team to the top of the Big 12 Conference standings. Over the course of the last year, Pickens, 77, steered his alma mater's athletics department to buy life insurance policies for himself and a posse of aging Cowboys donors.

A major source of health insurance for people who work for themselves is disappearing, casting thousands of contractors, freelancers and solo practitioners into the ranks of the uninsured with little hope of obtaining new coverage. Health plans offered by professional associations were once havens for millions of people who couldn't get coverage anywhere else.

California's new insurance commissioner moved quickly Tuesday to force changes at the troubled State Compensation Insurance Fund, wracked by the firing of top executives, resignations of board members, conflict-of-interest questions and reports of fiscal mismanagement. Commissioner Steve Poizner met with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for 45 minutes to outline a plan for sweeping changes less than a week after a top management shake-up at the insurer, known as State Fund.

Saying the healthcare debate here was not sufficiently focused on curbing insurers' profits, some lawmakers and consumer groups are backing a new effort to regulate medical insurance rates the same way the state controls auto coverage costs. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed that insurers be required to spend at least 85% of premiums on actual medical care, as HMOs in California now must do.