The State : Hearing Plea on Insurance

With 16 days to go before the Aug. 23 deadline for challenging insurance company requests to be exempted from Proposition 103 rate rollbacks, Insurance Commissioner Roxani Gillespie was asked by consumer groups to call for additional rollback hearings. Although the language of the proposition is ambiguous, Gillespie’s office and the consumer groups say companies for which hearings are not called by the deadline probably will be legally deemed to have won their exemptions. So far, Gillespie has called for hearings on only seven companies and has tentatively ordered $305 million in rollbacks. Harvey Rosenfeld, chairman of the Voter Revolt group, asked Gillespie to call hearings for all 445 companies that have applied for exemptions. Gillespie’s office said more hearings will be called, but it did not say how many.