My Background

I graduated from Oberlin College (’73) and Vanderbilt Law School (’78), and then worked for the Federal Trade Commission, after which I did public interest work for ten years, first for Ralph Nader and then for a Nader-esque organization called the National Insurance Consumer Organization, headed by Bob Hunter. I helped write Proposition 103 in California, a 1988 ballot initiative which changed California’s minimally regulated auto insurance market to a comprehensively-regulated one, and gave policyholders new rights to participate in rate proceedings. I also ran a campaign to place an insurance reform initiative on the ballot in New Jersey, which became the first—and still the only--initiative to be placed on the ballot in all 21 New Jersey counties, but which was ultimately struck down by the New Jersey Supreme Court.

After Jim Florio was elected governor of New Jersey in November 1989 he appointed me to be New Jersey Deputy Insurance Commissioner. I also helped draft Governor Florio’s health insurance reform bill, which was one of the first bills in the country to establish community rating in the individual and small group markets.

From 1993 to 1998 I served as Missouri’s Insurance Commissioner under Governor Mel Carnahan. We established a competitive bidding process in both our state health care plan and our workers compensation residual market, as a result of which rates declined substantially in both markets. The health insurance competitive bidding process was particularly successful, because we standardized the benefit package: unlike under the ACA, or with Medicare Advantage, the insurers had to compete aggressively on price, because they couldn’t compete by varying (and complicating) the benefits package.

At the Missouri Department we also accelerated the run-off of two of the largest insurance insolvencies in the country, Transit Casualty and Mission.

After leaving the Missouri DOI I worked for the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA), now known as CMS, as Director of its Private Health Insurance Group, and in 2000 I joined Quotesmith.com as Vice-President for Strategic Planning. Quotesmith was one of the first insurance brokers on the internet, and enabled people to get instantaneous quotes for standardized life insurance coverage from dozens of insurers. It has since merged with Insure.com.

After eight years in private law practice in Missouri and Washington, DC—almost all insurance-related--I served as the first director of Obamacare implementation at the U.S. Department of Human Services. Among other things, I oversaw the development and implementation of the Medical Loss Ratio rule and the so-called Patients Bill of Rights—rules that allowed kids to stay on their parents’ policies until age 26, limited pre-existing condition exclusion clauses, prohibited annual and lifetime limits, and limited charges for preventive services and emergency room treatment.

For the last ten years, until I retired in September of this year, I was a partner at Mehri & Skalet, mainly doing insurance class action litigation. Two of the more significant appellate cases in which we prevailed and which established important legal principles were St. Louis Effort for AIDS v. Huff, 782 F.3d 1016 (8th Cir. 2015), and Corbin v. Allstate Corp., 2019 IL App (5th) 170296. St. Louis Effort for AIDS overturned a Missouri statute that conflicted with the ACA and limited the ability of non-profit organizations to help people sign up for health insurance; Corbin held that the filed rate doctrine does not apply to auto insurance rates in Illinois.

I was happy to have the responsibilities I did for the last 40 years or so. But I’m also happy not to have them any more. I hope, though, that what I have done and learned over that 40 years or so might now be of some use to other lawyers.