CONCORD — Commissioner John Elias is resigning from his post as head of the New Hampshire Insurance Department after a 16-month tenure on the job, according to a letter sent to Gov. Chris Sununu last week.
Elias, who took over from longtime department head Roger Sevigny in June 2018, did not elaborate on the reasons behind the announcement, which was relatively sudden.
“Please accept this as my letter of resignation as the New Hampshire Insurance Department Commissioner with an effective date of December 13, 2019,” Elias wrote in the Nov. 19 letter. “This was an extremely difficult decision, but it is the best decision for my family.”
On Monday, Sununu said that Elias has extended his tenure to the end of the year, upon request from the governor. The commissioner was not available to comment Monday.
Elias, a relative newcomer to the Granite State, first joined the Insurance Department in 2016 after years in the insurance industry in Ohio. He worked in employment insurance, before moving to vice president of underwriting at an auto insurance company in Columbus, and at one point running his own insurance consulting firm.
On entering office, Elias inherited major shifts in New Hampshire’s health insurance landscape, including a 52% surge in premiums on the individual market and a shift of more than 50,000 Medicaid expansion patients into a managed care system.
He oversaw an attempted regulation of short-term “skinny” health insurance plans in New Hampshire, after a Trump administration rule expanded their use. That rule has since been put on hold by a federal court, stopping New Hampshire’s efforts.
And he worked to increase efficiency for various compliance reviews carried out by the department, according to a statement on Monday, including reducing the turnaround times for those reviews in the property and casualty division from 52 days to eight days.
“The Department is in a much better place than when I started,” he said. “This has everything to do with the talented individuals working there. They helped create a vision for the future.”
Over his year and a half, Elias aligned himself with several of Gov. Chris Sununu’s priorities. He helped develop and promote the governor’s unsuccessful Twin State paid family leave plan, a voluntary option that Sununu had hoped to launch with Vermont in opposition to a mandatory proposal from State House Democrats.
And he made similar contributions toward the latest iteration of that plan, which does not include Vermont.
He also locked arms with the governor over car insurance. In August he spoke against a Democratic bill to require auto insurance companies to increase payments to auto repair shops by raising the minimum standards of repair.
Democrats argued the bill would stop repair shops from being shortchanged by insurers and improve repairs. But Elias countered that the new standards were unnecessary and would only cause auto insurance premiums to increase. Sununu ultimately vetoed the bill.
At a press conference on Monday, Sununu said that the search for Elias’s successor would begin soon, with the hope to fill the position through an Executive Council nomination and vote by the end of the year.
“The Insurance Department is a very, very good position,” Sununu said.
“John has done a very good job in his role. … The hard part will be finding somebody to maintain a lot of the successes that we’ve had.”