For the commercial property and casualty, and employee benefits segments of the insurance industry, anti-rebating laws are both nonsense and anti-consumer. Competition is intended to protect competitiveness in the marketplace, not to protect competitors.
Producers need to be able to provide volume-based services to medium and larger clients. It should make no difference whether insurers, agents or brokers negotiate prices to be competitive.
But the commercial property and casualty and employee benefits industries often are effectively barred from providing market competitive services that their clients want and need because it can be impossible to determine whether some aspect of bundled or value-added services will potentially run afoul of a particular state’s anti-rebating rules.
