Nevada Insurance Regulator to Retire

Nevada Insurance Commissioner Alice Molasky-Arman is stepping down after a long regulatory career that included approval in 2007 of a $2.6 billion deal involving Nevada’s largest health insurer — a deal that troubled Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Molasky-Arman, retiring next September, was named commissioner in 1995 and has served under three governors. She’s the longest-serving insurance commissioner in state history. A replacement will be named following a national search.

During her tenure, Molasky-Arman oversaw the transformation of Nevada’s bankrupt industrial insurance system into a private mutual insurer and eventually a publicly traded stock company. She also formed an insurance association that helped doctors during a medical malpractice insurance crisis, and set up programs to combat insurance fraud.

While the $2.6 billion acquisition of Las Vegas-based Sierra Health Services Inc. by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group Inc. caused controversy, Gibbons spokesman Ben Kieckhefer said the deal wasn’t a factor in Molasky-Arman’s retirement.

Kieckhefer added the commissioner has provided “tremendous service for the state, and the governor appreciates that.”

The acquisition was criticized by some lawmakers, the Nevada State Medical Association, nurses and others who noted UnitedHealth’s regulatory problems in California and New York.

The 2007 Nevada approval prompted Gibbons to say at the time that he was “deeply concerned” that constraints in state law prevented the insurance commissioner “from acting more forcefully” to curb the potential for “monopolistic tendencies that can result from this merger.”

Latest Comments

• April 28, 2008 at 1:03 am

  BrownknowsFla says:

  This is indeed a great loss to the people of Nevada and to the insurance regulatory community nationwide. Having had the honor of working with Commr. Molasky-Arman both formal... read more