From divinity to Pa. insurance

Over the last two weeks, Joel Ario, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, has spent more than four days listening to more than 100 people talk about insurance and has still managed to be awake, alert and responsive to their questions and comments.

Of course, that is his job.

Ario became Pennsylvania's insurance commissioner on July 3 after months as acting commissioner.

For the next two weeks, Ario presided over a series of public hearings on the proposed merger between Independence Blue Cross of Philadelphia and Highmark Inc. of Pittsburgh.

The merger would create the largest health insurer in the state and one of the largest in the nation. It will be up to Ario and his department to approve the merger.

Ario had been a top insurance regulator in Oregon. But before that, he had been a consumer advocate, affiliated with several state Public Interest Research Groups - the organization started by Ralph Nader.

Ario, his wife, Diana, and their three sons, 14, 12 and 3 (same wife, he hastens to point out), have relocated from Oregon to Hershey.

Question: How do you describe your job to your children?

Answer: I talk a lot to a lot of people about complicated insurance issues. They like to know, "Daddy, how often do you talk to the governor?" The thing they say a lot is, "Daddy likes to talk."

Q: Do they have any idea what insurance is?

A: Not really.

Q: When you were growing up, what did you want to be?

A: Like most kids, I wanted to be a professional baseball or basketball player. When I got out of high school I thought I would be a mathematician just because it was my strongest aptitude.

Then I got to college and I got very interested in political things. It was the end of the Vietnam War. It was George McGovern's campaign. And so I got involved in that.

I thought I was going to go to law school but I had a professor who said, "You ought to go to divinity school."

I said, "Why would I do that? I haven't been to church in five years." He said, "You ask the kind of questions people ask in divinity school."

I could be a minister, but I've never been ordained.

But I have a third career in me. It champions the notion that religion should be bringing people together, rather than driving people apart. Most people's image of religion in our culture is the far-right brand, which basically picks issues designed to polarize people.

Q: After divinity school, what was next?

A: Then I went to [Harvard] law school. At that time, I liked school. Easy life.

I ended up kind of by accident falling into the Public Interest Research Groups, because they had a job for me in Boston. For 13 years. I was a consumer and environmental advocate.

Q: And then?

A: The insurance commissioner in Oregon asked me to come work for him to help him do health-care reform. I was ready for a career change. What I found happening to me was that I didn't fit the [advocate's] role anymore. I felt that I was having to be the shrill voice to counteract what I thought were fairly extreme corporate voices. I thought, I want to be the broker who tries to figure out the solution among competing viewpoints, rather than [be] one of the viewpoints.

Q: What interests you about insurance?

A: Here's the two things I like about insurance: One, it touches people's lives when they're in a moment of need. You read the transcripts from the [World Trade Center] Towers, from 9/11. What was on people's minds when they realized they weren't going to make it? They were calling their loved ones and saying, "You know, honey, the life insurance policy is in the top drawer."

And two, it's a very interesting intellectual puzzle, a very complicated set of issues. So, trying to translate how insurance actually works to policymakers is a real challenge.

Q: If this is so engrossing, what do you do for fun - go over your policies when you get home?

A: Well, first, obviously, is my family. Second - my wife would say first - is golf. And number three would be hiking. For my 55th birthday, I'm hiking 55 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

Q: Why do you like hiking?

A: I feel more at peace, serene, with God, when I'm out in nature. The immensity of everything diminishes the clutter in your own life.

Q: As an advocate and regulator, you've been involved in politics in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and now here. How does the political atmosphere compare?

A: On the one hand you had Oregon, which was a small state with a tradition of bipartisanship and people working things out. And then there was Washington, D.C., an environment gridlocked with a lot of partisanship. If 1 is Oregon and 10 is Washington, [Pennsylvania] is around 7, maybe up at 8, toward Washington.

It's a pretty difficult partisan environment. The governor is hard-charging against Republican leadership in the Senate. And the Republican leadership in the Senate is pretty hostile to the governor. I don't know how you get through things like that.

I'd always found Ed Rendell to be a very fascinating person because he's a larger-than-life kind of figure. I think his health-care reform package is one of the best in the country.

Q: How's the decision-making process going?

A: I'm telling the truth when I say I have an open mind and we're still fact-finding. I'm hoping that it's not like this agonizing thing in the end. A torturous kind of decision.

Q: Are you a suffering decision-maker?

A: No, it's difficult sometimes if the decision is really a close one. But I am the kind of person that makes up my mind, decides something, then moves forward.

Life's too short, you know?