The Times endorses
Return Mike Kreidler

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Mike Kreidler is the official who blocked the conversion of Premera Blue Cross to a stock company. For fighting to keep Washington's largest health insurer unbeholden to Wall Street — a job not yet done — he deserves re-election as Washington's insurance commissioner.

Other states have considered applications by their Blues to become stock companies. Several states gave in and later regretted it. This state is lucky to be one of only 11 states that have elected insurance commissioners, and to have one sensitive to public opinion. The decision did not come cheap. Kreidler and his counterpart in Alaska billed Premera more than $21 million for lawyers, investment bankers and consultants. It is an astonishing amount. Kreidler says it was to protect his decision from legal appeal — and Premera has appealed.

Compared with his predecessor, Deborah Senn, Kreidler is more the technocrat. The insurers have not liked everything he did — telling them, for example, that if they covered prescription drugs they had to cover contraceptives — but they get along with him. He restored the office's national accreditation, which meant other states will once again accept a Washington audit by our regulators.

Kreidler pushed through a bill regulating (but not banning) credit scoring, the controversial practice of using credit records to judge insurance risk. He has proposed a state-owned reinsurance pool for medical expenses over $25,000 a year and another reinsurance pool for medical-malpractice carriers. In the past, he has suggested that catastrophic health insurance should be compulsory.

This page does not always agree with him, but he has done a professional job. His Republican opponent, John Adams, for many years has been an insurance broker serving the fishing industry. He knows what he does, but he has never held a job that would prepare him in any depth to be the state's premier insurance regulator. He has raised almost no money and provides only token opposition to the incumbent.

It's an easy race for Kreidler but an important one for the state — he should be returned as insurance commissioner.