Cheap Massachusetts Auto Insurance – Rates Drop

News Break! finally some relief from the rising rates on insurance in Massachusetts. New ruling could make rates cap out which is not what the insurance carriers want to see happen. Cheaper rates are in line for customers but at what price for the carriers?

Taken from Google News 7-11-07

In the coming days, Judge Burnes is expected to lay out the Patrick administration’s 2008 course on Massachusetts auto insurance. The options range from maintaining the current system that flattens rates for mostly urban and young drivers all the way to deregulating rates and allowing insurers to set their own premiums.

Many urban drivers fear that a dramatic deviation from the current system could only increase their annual bills by 25 percent or possibly more.

Many suburb drivers would welcome a newly created deregulated system that relieves them of the roughly $100 they now pay annually to subsidize urban and inexperienced drivers who are more vulnerable to accidents and theft. Burnes, a former Superior Court judge, needs to find a way to balance these interests.

Competition for auto insurance in Massachusetts isn’t as fierce as elsewhere. Some national brand name insurers want no part of a system that gives the state insurance commissioner power to set the annual premium rate.

But MA residents can live without such companies, and especially their often specious criteria — credit rating, occupation, homeownership — for setting rates. When such companies are in the driver’s seat, customers are unfairly relegated to assigned risk pools, in which they are forced to pay the company’s preposterous “dirty rates.” Faced with premiums they can’t afford, more drivers will hit the road uninsured. And no one wants to run into them.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.