The law states that I must carry liability insurance on my vehicle, full coverage if it's financed. Not that my car is guaranteed to be paid off if it is totaled. Thus comes more insurance to cover that. With a driving record with no tickets and no claims, I seem to get no breaks for that on the cost.
Yet I am made to feel at risk if I don't carry Un insured Motorist Protection in case someone else doesn't pay for at least liability, and they happen to hit my car.
When you watch the news and see the hit and run accidents from the previous night, does it go through your mind how many of these people are un insured? Is that the reason they had to run? If we made sure they all carried their responsible level of insurance would it free up any of law enforcement's time? Seems like they have to be caught doing something before it is determined they are not insured.
I have been rear ended by a girl that had no insurance. She wanted to go home and get her insurance card before I called the police. While I wrote down her tag number, I told her that I insisted we wait for an officer. He determined she did not have insurance. And I'm sure if she knew I was not going to write down her license plate number she would have left in a cloud of dust. She got a ticket, left town, and my insurance company had to repair my car. I assume she had a record, since she slammed into me while I was at a stop sign for over a minute, she should not be on the road at all.
Now if a simple person as myself can make a database and sort it by cell, why can't there be a database of all vehicles registered in the state to make sure they are insured?
I would think the insurance agencies would find a wealth of new potential customers from this database. The revenue from one liability policy is more that my cost for un insured motorist protection. The data coming from the insurance companies on a periodic level would create and keep it going. The database should be secure of course and each qualifying insurance company would have an official code or vendor number to have access to the base.
You're going to hear those who can't afford insurance. Well, owning a car or driving creates costs in itself. We already have to have tags and inspections to keep them on the road. If they are serious about needing the car to get to work, etc, they need to be insured. How many of these people should not be driving anyway? How many are just running the streets up to no good? I assume a good enough portion to make a difference in injuries and fatalities that our law enforcement has to deal with. I was not stranger to working an extra job no matter how demeaning if I needed extra bill money.
I don't feel rights would be violated to make sure we uphold a law when there are programs in place to make sure we uphold other laws already. Don't they come looking when you don't pay your taxes or car payment? I think so.
With insurance costs rising, and employment benefits decreasing these days, sure I don't have all the protection I would like to have at my age, though I used to. I could afford it back then. But I don't like paying for these people to be able to shrug off this law.
Any new program may have loopholes, problems. It's a starting point. That's where modification and revision comes into our vocabulary. Everything costs money. But ask that family got their lives ruined by an uninsured motorist how they measure that cost.
I feel lucky my bumper was only demolished. But I would gladly donate my time and input to help with this starting point.
