This is not good news: "25.5 percent of 5,012 drivers stopped in Travis County and small portions of nearby Williamson and Hays counties since June 2, didn't have auto insurance." That won't help the "uninsured driver" portion of your premium go down, will it? Years ago, I sat on a compensation committee at work. Many of the folks on that committee argued that our health benefits should count as salary when compared to comparable jobs around town that had no health benefits because "the people in those jobs" (and we were talking about the lowest end of the pay scale) "were having to pay their insurance premiums out of their own pockets." I argued that those people were not, in fact, paying for health insurance. "They're not????" came the incredulous response. Um, no. They're hoping they don't need health insurance and when they end up needing medical care, they go to free clinics and the emergency room. I bet those same committee members would be equally dumbfounded to discover that 1-in-4 cars next to them on the freeway aren't properly insured. I'm not. People just hope they don't get caught. And, for the most part, they don't get caught. While the rest of us pay.
By the way, I do realize that the 1-in-4 number is probably higher than the actual number of uninsured drivers. People who get stopped for some sort of moving violation are probably more likely to be uninsured than folks who go along obeying all the other laws of the road (speed limits and what not). Still. That's a lot of people driving around without insurance. Sigh...
Posted on by