Montana's insurance commissioner, John Morrison, is pushing to provide consumers with information on the "market conduct" of most insurance companies nationwide.

If Morrison's proposal is adopted by insurance regulators, consumers could check to see how often a company cancels policies, delays claim payments or gets sued, among other things.

"Consumers will be able to compare companies to determine if a company is average, below average or above average, in measures of performance, or how they treat customers," he says. "We're looking at market conduct more and more."

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners may decide this weekend at its annual conference whether to adopt the proposal, or perhaps next month.

But Morrison and the NAIC face a wall of opposition from the insurance industry, which says the proposal is too much, too soon.

The information won't be of much use to consumers, and instead could be misused by an insurer's competitors, to wrongly portray a company in a bad light, industry representatives say.

"There's really been no justification for the need to make this information available in the public realm," said Marsha Brown, regulatory affairs counsel for the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies in Indianapolis, Ind.

Insurers are asking the NAIC to delay this weekend's vote in San Francisco, saying more time is needed to work out the details of the proposal.

"This hasn't been vetted enough through the NAIC process," says Deirdre Manna of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America.

Finally, insurers are questioning how the proposal can be enforced and whether it's legal, because many states have laws that forbid public disclosure of the market-conduct data.

The initial proposal applies to all types of insurance except health insurance. However, health insurers are among those opposing it, suspecting that they will be included in the reporting requirements in the future.

Morrison says arguments against the proposal don't hold water, and that he expects the NAIC to adopt it by next month. The first reports would be due next May, reporting 2008 data.

Regulators have been scrutinizing the plan for many months and first began gathering "market conduct" data six years ago, he says.

"It's not very often that people accuse the NAIC of acting too quickly," Morrison says. "The argument that this is a new idea that's being rushed through is disingenuous."

As for the information being misused by competitors or others, Morrison says the NAIC plans to work with the industry to ensure that the data are objective and accurate. Consumers have a right to see that information, to help them decide which company they want to do business with, he says:

The state laws that forbid disclosure refer primarily to data gathered for market-conduct reports, Morrison adds. Under the proposal, the information would be part of insurers' annual financial statements, which must be disclosed to the public, he says.

Companies will file one statement that includes financial and market-conduct data and the NAIC will transmit it to all states and collect and condense the data, making them available to the public, Morrison says.

"The information would be more extensive, more accurate and provide a picture of the entire marketplace," he says. "The industry has lobbied against this proposal pretty vigorously. But they haven't persuaded many (state insurance) commissioners."