I occasionally receive releases from the Consumer Federation of America, and this particular one about a retiring director would normally not have sparked much interest. But reading it, I learned a lot about someone whose advocacy really influenced reforms in the insurance industry. Yesterday, the CFA announced that J. Robert “Bob” Hunter, the organization’s director of insurance since 1995, was retiring, as reported by InsuranceNewsNet. During his career, Hunter won several significant legislative and regulatory reforms of the insurance industry and led the way to changes in the way the industry operates. The trade magazine National Underwriter once named him among the “25 Living Legends of Insurance.” “Bob built the consumer advocacy presence in the American insurance industry from scratch, and anyone who has purchased insurance owes him tremendous gratitude,” said Jack Gillis, CFA’s executive director. “By virtue of the problems he exposed, the reforms he spurred, and the changes to industry practices that came from his work, we calculate that his research and advocacy have saved American consumers hundreds of billions of dollars.” CFA’s insurance advocate, Doug Heller, will succeed Hunter as director of insurance. “Bob has been an unrelenting advocate for four decades, whose work has dramatically changed the way insurance in America is priced and how claims are paid,” said Heller, who has worked with Hunter at CFA since 2013. “For the past 40 years, the insurance industry has always had to ask themselves ‘What’s Bob going to say?’ whenever a consumer issue was on the table.”