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To: Nat’l Ass’n of Insurance Commissioners, April 30, 2009 Hearing on Credit Score Rating
From: Nat’l Organization for Women, Patrick Butler, Insurance Project Director
• Mandatory insurance works badly because pay-per-car premiums offer
drivers only one way to economize—use fewer cars more miles each.
• Inconvenience keeps drivers from doing this until forced to by high
premiums. When groups have to share cars, average miles
rise.
• Result: insurers correlate more claims (per 100 car years) with lower
credit score
groups and raise per-car premiums.
• To get all cars insured, insurers must offer a way to save that doesn't
make drivers give up cars—and then have to pay ever-higher
premiums on the remaining cars they are sharing.
• Texas lawmakers did the right thing when they passed HB 45 in
2001, a law validating the cents-per-odometer-mile
premium option,
which is the only workable remedy in a free market.
• Now insurers are just starting to cooperate with this way to make
mandatory insurance work better. (See over for note to NAIC.)
Affordable Auto Insurance
¾ How it's being sabotaged by credit score rating
¾ Why high rates for low credit score drivers can't
be regulated away. What can be done instead
Insurance Project, Texas NOW and
National Organization for Women
www.centspermilenow.org, (512) 695-5136
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Cents-per-mile choice—How it works
The choice of exposure unit*
*
between the car-year unit and the odometer-mile
unit is straightforward for companies to set up. (They've long offered the
odometer-mile as an alternative exposure unit for some commercial fleets.)
After first assigning a car as usual to a risk class (by territory, car and driver
type, and car use), the company offers the customer a choice between staying
with, for example, a fixed premium of $600 a year for driving coverages
(liability and collision) or paying a matching 5.0¢ a mile for the same risk class
and coverage to buy miles of insurance in advance.
The miles are added to the odometer reading and recorded on the insurance ID
card. The owner buys more miles when needed. The company has the odometer
read annually and when the owner changes cars or companies. Owners pay only
for insurance used, and if the odometer limit is exceeded, the car is uninsured.
It's that simple.**
Pay-per-mile also eliminates a major enforcement problem. Today's ID card
shows the policy term but not whether insurance has lapsed through non-
payment of installments. Under the pay-per-mile alternative, checking the
odometer reading against the ID card's odometer limit shows immediately
whether insurance is actually in force.***
Driving a car, not owning it, is what produces cost for the insurance company,
mile by mile, and that's the actuarially sound way to pay for it.
* At the Casualty Actuarial Society's 1988 Ratemaking Seminar, CAS Fellow Richard Woll distinguished between car-miles
as an odometer exposure-unit measure and the estimated future mileage discount classes as one of many possible classification
variables (including education and occupation levels as inverse proxies for group-average miles per car year).
"[I]t makes an awful lot of sense to think of it [mileage] as an exposure variable. However, when you are trying to
explain classification effects, you have got to recognize that mileage is a classification variable today, not an
exposure variable. What is explained by mileage on a prospective basis is quite different than looking backward and
explaining effects through past actual mileage."
** In October 2008, a new insurance company in Texas began offering (only) cents-per-odometer mile premiums using this
method, but without an annual odometer reading. For a description visit www.MileMeter.com
.
*** Note to NAIC: Regarding ability-to-pay for mandatory insurance, it is essential that, when the odometer limit is exceeded,
liability coverage must be considered cancelled for non pre-payment of premium—now the case when an installment is not
paid when due. Otherwise drivers who do keep pre-paid miles on their odometers will be paying higher cents-per-mile liability
insurance prices than they should. See the report to Texas legislators that prompted enactment of HB 45 in 2001—“Why the
Standard Automobile Insurance Market Breaks Down in Low-Income Zip Codes” at www.centspermilenow.org
. (The report is
on the lower right.)
