State Regulation of Insurance Rates

The stretching out of the long arm of the state to regulate and control the prices to be charged for insurance is a single incident in a legislative program, very wide-spread in scope, fairly modern in development, and at present proceeding at an accelerated rate. Legislation inevitably is colored by the national ideology, and that ideology has undergone and is still undergoing a profound change. The older of us can still recall the individualistic ideology that prevailed throughout most of the 19th century, and the emphasis laid in it upon free competition and the law of supply and demand. Prices, it was thought, followed a natural law, and legislative attempts to interfere with the operation of that law were not merely useless but positively harmful.