Atlantic City casinos closing...

"Quite a while ago there was a congressman from California who lived either in Bel Air or Beverly Hills and he came right out and said that if you based rates on ones driving record (speeding and accidents) and then factored in the cost of repairs (upscale neighborhoods have upscale cars) then his constituents would end up paying a hell of a lot more for their insurance (their fare share) and he would have none of that."

That is how they do it. Tickets and accidents effect premiums in extreme amounts. There's no better example than myself. When I was 18 driving around with a bunch of moving violations and accident on my record, the lowest quote I got for insurance on an $18,000 car was $11,000 for 6 months. ($11,000 is not a typo). A few years later, when everything came off my license, I paid $1200 on a $30,000 car for 6 months. To be fair, though, my $11,000 quote was well earned.

If you guys want to see how insurance companies really abuse people, you need to look at how they pay claims. Whatever injustices there are in calculating premiums, they pale in comparison to what they do when a policy holder has a legit claim. Its unreal. I have no idea how they get away with paying out such low amounts. And they do it to everyone, not just the poor.

Not to get too far off point here and certainly not to defend Insurance Companies, I'd be near the bottom of that list, but what about the insurance fraudsters ZD? Several years back my nephew who was 16 years old at the time on a learner's permit with my wife present was 2 cars back of a stop light and decided to switch in the far left lane and scraped the bumper of the commercial pickup truck in front of him. Long story short the guy in the truck feigned a "back injury", sued me for the limits of my liability policy which was well over 100k, sat in the insurance companies office with his attorney present I would add, and talked with his wife about the car he was going to get right with his money in front of my wife and myself while we waited to give our depositions. This is no joke, it really happened.

A friends daughter, who years back was a claims adjuster for a large auto Insurance Company, (go Flo) told me that well over 70% of the claims she dealt with were to varying degrees fraudlent. So it wouldn't surprise me that insurance companies take the low road as many of those they insure. A very sad testimony indeed.

Footnote to the story, they ended up settling for 40K for absolutely nothing, no damage to the truck whatsoever while my car had a scrape on the side totalling 1.5K of damage.

If you guys want to see how insurance companies really abuse people, you need to look at how they pay claims. Whatever injustices there are in calculating premiums, they pale in comparison to what they do when a policy holder has a legit claim. Its unreal. I have no idea how they get away with paying out such low amounts. And they do it to everyone, not just the poor.

So true!

Come to coastal NJ/NY and meet with people who were "touched" by Sandy. If you met with 100 people maybe 5 would be OK with their insurance settlement. The remaining 95 will have the same story of receiving about 1/3 of what the claim should have been. We were "touched" and our claim was about $42,000, we received $11,400! Barely enough to replace our furnace and hot water heater.
Oh and our flood insurance rate went up 40%!

Planning a trip to Atlantic City in two days ..