Air Ambulance Provider Halts State Insurance Regulation, For Now

An air ambulance provider won an order blocking West Virginia’s insurance commissioner from regulating its prepaid membership program while a lawsuit over the state’s ability to impose such regulations proceeds, because a federal aviation law likely bars the suit, a federal court said.

Air Evac EMS Inc. showed that it’s likely to prove its membership program isn’t insurance and that the state’s attempts to regulate it as such are preempted by the Airline Deregulation Act, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia said.

The commissioner’s attempts to broadly define “insurance” to reach a program offering prepayment ...