State Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready’s first 18 months in office gives new meaning to the term “hitting the ground running.”

As head of an agency integral to the state’s disaster response, Mulready took office in 2019, which proved to be the year that spawned the second largest number of tornadoes, followed by devastating floods nearly statewide.

And then came 2020.

Mulready still managed to find the bright side in an interview Thursday with the Times & Free Press:

“It’s given me great experience and exposure to get out and watch our team help folks.”

Mulready spent most of Thursday in Kingfisher, visiting first with local insurance agents, then Fire Chief Tony Stewart and the local newspaper and finally speaking at the Lions Club’s weekly luncheon.

Flood Insurance Crucial

Mulready’s first official exposure to the devastation wreaked by floods drove home one point – the value of flood insurance.

“I always contrast it to tornadoes because you come in and there’s devastation but 90% of the damaged property is covered by insurance, so it’s painful but eventually it gets rebuilt,” he said.

“We found with floods it’s more like 10% of the property that’s insured. That’s the discouraging thing, the lack of people with flood insurance.”

Mulready said he visited neighborhoods shortly after the flooding in May 2019 and then went back again this past Memorial Day.

“There were so many folks still not back in their homes because of a lack of insurance,” he said. “A lot of folks think that FEMA is going to ride in on their white horse in a big disaster and they do help, but their average check is $8,000 and flood damage can be $50,000 or more.

“Anyone can buy flood insurance, whether you live in a flood zone or not. If it rains where you live, it can flood where you live.”

Navigating a Pandemic

Mulready’s second year in office started with the last minute details of completing and moving into new office space at 50th and Lincoln in Oklahoma City.

But then, the pandemic.

On March 3, we had a grand opening and ribbon cutting at our new building,” he said. “Thirteen days later, we sent everyone home.”

But like all other government agencies in a state where the possibility of losing your base of operations rears its head at the start of every spring tornado season, Mulready’s department pivoted fairly easily into its continuity of operations plan.

“What we were telling everyone is our doors are closed but the insurance department is not,” he said.

Good thing, too, because it turns out that many problems that arose during the pandemic involved insurance issues.

“As a department, we’ve tried to offer guidance to the insurance industry on how they need to handle things,” he said.

For example, Mulready said his office advised health insurance plans to waive copays for telemedicine and cost sharing for COVID testing and told pharmacies they did not need to require patients to sign for prescriptions drugs and could dispense in larger quantities to allow for fewer trips for refills.

“We looked for things we thought would be helpful and we offered guidance instead of mandates, which set up a good relationship with insurance companies,” he said. “As a result, a number of companies have stepped forward to do things without being asked.”

And in an effort to solve emerging problems in a timely manner, Mulready became an unexpected caller on some customer service lines.

When medical clinics operating near the Texas border developed staffing problems due to the pandemic, they were not able to hire practitioners from the Texas side of the line because malpractice insurance would not cover doctors practicing in states where they weren’t licensed.

“I happened to be in the office after 5 p.m. when that issue was called in so I picked up the phone and called the malpractice insurance company’s customer service line,” he said. “I got an immediate call back from the company’s CFO and within an hour the company waived its policy during a state of emergency.”

Another issue he was able to address was a midyear adjustment of liability insurance premiums for restaurant owners.

In a typical year, liability premiums are set in January based on estimated receipts and then adjusted either up or down at the end of the year based on actual receipts.

“With the pandemic, most restaurants have been closed and have no money to pay their premiums while waiting on the end-of-year adjustment,” Mulready said. “I was able to get insurors to agree to a midyear adjustment.

“That was another call to a customer service line, lol. That time they didn’t believe me at first that I was actually the insurance commissioner.”

When automobile insurance companies started saving money on claims because no one was taking road trips during the pandemic, Mulready encouraged them to share the wealth immediately with their customers.

“As of today (Thursday), state drivers have received a total of $164 million in premium refunds or credits of about 15-25%,” he said. “They responded right in the middle of when people were out of work and hurting. That was great to see.”

Other Services

Another service of his agency that Mulready likes to talk about is the online life insurance policy locator.

“The example I give is when mom or dad passes away and the siblings aren’t sure whether their parent had a life insurance policy in place or what company it’s with,” he said. “They can go through our website and find out if there’s an active policy in place.”

Since its inception, the life insurance locator has recovered $13 million in insurance proceeds that families weren’t aware of or didn’t know how to find, he said.

Insurance companies aren’t allowed to keep unclaimed proceeds. Eventually, that money would end up in the state’s unclaimed property fund and listed in a notice in the newspaper, giving families another opportunity to claim it.

“But our system is a way for that money to make its way to the right hands in a much more timely manner,” Mulready said.

The state insurance department also mans a consumer assistance line which fields about 16,000 complaints per year, mostly about insurance claims that haven’t been satisfied.

“We were able to resolve $7.3 million in claims last year,” he said. “We don’t always win because sometimes the insurance company is right, but we are a go-between and can help consumers get issues resolved faster.”

The department also provides a federally-funded Medicare assistance program, hosting a number of public seminars each spring to help senior citizens understand the intricacies of the Medicare process.

Like most public programs during the pandemic, the seminars pivoted from in person meetings to virtual conferences.

“We were concerned about what that might do to attendance, but we were pleasantly surprised,” he said. “We actually had more seniors participating this year – about 1,300 in the four seminars.”

The insurance department also helps area fire departments make changes necessary to improve their communities’ ISO ratings, a factor that determines the cost of residential and commercial insurance premiums.