Mutual Benefit is the nation's 18th-largest life insurer, with more than $13 billion in assets and 400,000 individual policyholders nationwide.

If you're an individual policyholder over 55, you get an annual premium increase.

It affects only about 1% of individual policyholders, but appears to be on the increase.

But it is by far the largest insurer for individual policyholders.

Q. Does this mean that individual policyholders need not worry about insurers' health?

Last month Blue Cross received an average 24.6 percent rate increase for individual policyholders.

In addition to the individual policyholders, the company insures two million people who are covered by group policies where they work.

But no private company would want them as individual policyholders at a price anyone could afford.

But the regulation, which would have applied to individual policyholders and small groups, never took effect.

"It was a crazy idea to impose this on a weak part of the population," namely individual policyholders and small groups, he said.