Let me start with a comparison that I think tells you everything, and that I have never seen made in a Minnesota campaign.
If a roofing contractor mistreats you after a storm, Minnesota law hands you an express private right of action — you can sue, in your own name, under a statute written for exactly that purpose.
If your insurance company mishandles the same claim on the same roof, you have no such right. Minnesota's Unfair Claims Practices Act sets standards for how insurers must handle your claim — but our Supreme Court held decades ago that you cannot sue to enforce them, and the Legislature wrote that bar into the statute itself. Only the Commerce Department can act on those standards.
Two parties to the same storm. One is suable by you. The other is not.
What the bad-faith statute actually does
Minnesota does have an insurance bad-faith statute, Minn. Stat. § 604.18, passed in 2008. Consumers hear "bad faith" and picture the movie version. Here is the real machinery, from the text:
- The remedy is capped at $250,000, plus up to $100,000 in attorney fees.
- What you recover is denominated "taxable costs" — not damages.
- You cannot plead it in your complaint. You must move the court for leave to add it later.
- It does not apply to health insurers at all. If your health plan denies your claim in bad faith, this statute is not available to you.
- It disappears if the dispute goes to appraisal or arbitration — where a great many property claims go.
- And the provision I'd read aloud at a hearing: subdivision 4(d) makes the Commerce Department's own findings, and the statutory claim-handling standards themselves, inadmissible in your case.
Read that last one twice. The state investigates insurers and writes standards for claim handling. Then, if you sue, the law says a jury may not be told what the state found or what the standard is.
There is also no common-law bad-faith tort in Minnesota for a first-party claim — that has been settled since 1979, restated by the Supreme Court in 1986. So § 604.18 is not a supplement to a robust body of law. It is nearly the whole of it.
And the enforcement that replaced your lawsuit
If the regulator is the exclusive remedy, the fair question is: how is the regulator doing?
I pulled the Commerce Department's enforcement database — 227 actions from 2023 through 2026, totaling about $11.6 million in penalties. Within that, the claim-handling cases look like this:
- State Farm paid $5,000 for failing to timely administer auto glass claims.
- Country Mutual paid $1,500 for failing to conduct a reasonable investigation and denying a claim.
Five thousand dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars. Against companies whose Minnesota premium revenue runs into the billions. Whatever those penalties are, they are not deterrence; they are a rounding error and a filing fee.
The one genuine outlier is worth crediting, because it shows the office can act at scale when it decides to: a $7.35 million consent order against HealthPartners in April 2026, under the statute barring retroactive revocation of a prior authorization. That is a real number and a real principle — you cannot approve care and then un-approve it after the patient has received it. It is also, notably, a prior-authorization case, which is where the whole national fight now lives.
The denial numbers, and the Minnesota-sized hole in them
Nationally, insurers on the ACA marketplaces denied about 19 percent of in-network claims in the most recent federal data — with individual insurers ranging from 3 percent to 36 percent. Under 1 percent of denials were appealed, and of those appealed, insurers upheld about two-thirds.
Now the part that should embarrass all of us: there is no equivalent Minnesota number. The federal transparency data covers HealthCare.gov states, and Minnesota runs its own exchange. So our denial rates are simply not in the public dataset.
It gets worse. Minnesota does have an external-review process, and the law requires that its outcome data be made available — but only "upon request." Not published. Not posted. Not in an annual report a legislator or a reporter would trip over. The single most useful consumer statistic in health insurance — how often does an independent reviewer overturn your insurer? — exists in a file cabinet in St. Paul and is invisible to the people whose claims it describes.
On prior authorization specifically, the physicians' own 2025 survey found 26 percent of doctors reporting a prior-authorization delay that led to a serious adverse event for a patient. In that survey, UnitedHealthcare — Eden Prairie's own — was rated the most burdensome of six major insurers, with 75 percent of physicians calling its burden high or extremely high. And a U.S. Senate investigation built on 280,000 pages of documents found the same company's post-acute prior-authorization denial rate rose from 10.9 percent to 22.7 percent between 2020 and 2022 as it deployed an automated authorization model.
Minnesota did respond to that last trend, and it deserves credit: a 2026 law bans AI-only claim denials, effective January 1, 2027 — a human being must be in the loop. Good. That same act reopened the insurance-practices chapter and left both the private-right-of-action bar and § 604.18 exactly as they were.
One correction I owe you, because the standard runs both ways
I expected the property-insurance section of this article to be about Minnesotans getting dropped. The data says otherwise, so here is the data.
Using the U.S. Senate Budget Committee's own county-level dataset, Minnesota had the lowest homeowners nonrenewal rate of all 51 jurisdictions in 2023 — 0.325 percent — lower than its own rate in 2018. Insurers are not fleeing Minnesota and they are not dropping Minnesotans at unusual rates. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not reading the report they are citing.
Minnesota's property-insurance problem is real, but it is a different problem: price and claim handling. As documented earlier in this series, Minnesota homeowners' premiums rose 34 percent in 2025 — the largest increase in the nation. You can get a policy here. What you cannot easily do is afford it, or fight it when the claim comes back short.
What we can do
Publish the external-review data. Every year, in a table: how many appeals, by insurer, and how many were overturned. It exists. Requiring publication instead of "upon request" is a one-line amendment and the single highest-value transparency fix available in Minnesota insurance law.
Fix § 604.18's self-defeating provisions. At minimum: let the plaintiff plead it in the complaint rather than seek permission later, and repeal subdivision 4(d) so a jury can be told what the state's own standards are. A statute that hides the standard from the factfinder is not a remedy, it's a maze.
Make the penalties mean something. A $5,000 fine for mishandling claims is a line item, not a consequence. Penalties should scale with premium volume, and the department's claim-handling actions should be published in plain language where policyholders can find them.
And appeal. Under 1 percent of denied claims are ever appealed, which is the single largest piece of leverage consumers are leaving on the table. Get the denial reason in writing. Use the internal appeal. Then use Minnesota's external review — a genuinely good process that almost nobody knows exists.
Insurance is a promise you pay for in advance and collect on during the worst week of your life. Minnesota gives you a well-drafted right to sue the contractor who fixes your roof. It ought to give you at least as much against the company that promised to pay for it.
Sources
Minn. Stat. § 604.18 (bad-faith standard, the $250,000 and $100,000 caps, taxable-costs remedy, the motion-to-amend requirement, the health-carrier exclusion, appraisal and arbitration limits, and the inadmissibility provision at subd. 4(d)); Minn. Stat. § 72A.201, subd. 1 (codifying the bar on private enforcement of claim-practices standards); Minn. Stat. § 325E.66, subd. 2 (private right of action against residential contractors); Minn. Stat. § 62Q.73, subd. 10 (external review data available upon request); and the 2026 act prohibiting AI-only denials, adding Minn. Stat. § 62M.09, subd. 3(f), effective Jan. 1, 2027 — all verified against raw statutory text at revisor.mn.gov. Morris v. American Family Mutual Insurance Co., 386 N.W.2d 233 (Minn. 1986), read in full, restating the rule from Haagenson v. National Farmers Union Property & Casualty Co., 277 N.W.2d 648 (Minn. 1979). Minnesota Department of Commerce enforcement database, 227 actions from 2023 through 2026 (approximately $11.58 million in total penalties), including the State Farm auto-glass action, the Country Mutual claim-investigation action, and the April 17, 2026 HealthPartners consent order citing Minn. Stat. § 62M.07, subd. 3. KFF, claims denials and appeals in ACA marketplace plans (published Mar. 24, 2026, using 2024 data) — the 19 percent in-network denial rate, the 3–36 percent insurer range, the under-1-percent appeal rate, and the two-thirds upheld figure; KFF states that state-based marketplaces including Minnesota's are excluded, so no Minnesota-specific denial rate exists in that data. American Medical Association prior-authorization survey (fielded December 2025, n=1,000) — the 26 percent serious-adverse-event finding and insurer burden ratings. U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Refusal of Recovery (Oct. 17, 2024) — post-acute prior-authorization denial rates and the automated authorization model. U.S. Senate Budget Committee county-level homeowners insurance dataset (2023) — Minnesota's 0.325 percent nonrenewal rate, lowest of 51 jurisdictions. UnitedHealth Group headquarters location per its FY2025 Form 10-K cover page (Eden Prairie, Minnesota). Minnesota homeowners premium increases per Insurify data as reported in Minnesota coverage and cited earlier in this series.
Post-storm contractor-fraud enforcement data and NAIC premium tables were not obtained and are not asserted here. The underlying consent orders in two Commerce matters were not individually retrieved beyond the database entries. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.