Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Posts Tagged ‘uninsured’

The City of Dallas has begun in earnest with the new policy of towing the vehicles of uninsured motorists. I hope the Austin Police copy this tactic and that word spreads quickly and greatly reduces the number of drivers who don’t carry the mandatory auto liability coverage. This would be a great benefit to our personal injury clients, and to motorists in general. On New Year’s Day Dallas police towed 20 vehicles.

I’ve written many times about the problems Texas has with uninsured motorists. More than 25% of Texas drivers have no auto insurance, even though it’s required by state law. This new policy of towing uninsured cars will disproportionately affect poor people, who find it harder to afford insurance. But the law is the law – even poor people are required to carry insurance, and poverty is not a good excuse to drive uninsured.

If you drive in Dallas and you either haven’t bought insurance or you have let your insurance lapse, you better take care of that soon or you could be facing very expensive costs to get your car out of the pound.

A large number of drivers on Texas highways and roads do not have auto insurance.

A 60-day pilot project testing the Texas-Sure program (which allows law enforcement personnel to verify coverage status when they stop a motorist) focused on Travis County.  During the test, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers found 25.5 percent of 5,012 drivers stopped in Travis County and a small portion of Williamson County and Hays County since June 2 did not have auto insurance.

This spring, the minimum amount of liability insurance Texas drivers are required to have increased for the first time in 22 years (from $20,000 to $25,000).

Two things you should take away -

1) Carry uninsured motorist coverage to protect yourself

2) Cary under-insured motorist coverage to protect yourself from the very real possibility of a sky-high medical bill

To reduce the number of drivers without auto insurance, the state of Texas has launched a database that allows law enforcement officials to tell which drivers have insurance and which don’t.

The program, known as TexasSure, began in the Austin area on June 2, and is being tested for about 60 days before it is expected to go statewide.

Texas drivers are required by law to have auto insurance, but one in five is uninsured, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.

Drivers will still be required to carry proof of insurance, but the database was created to counter those who purchase an, insurance policy, get an insurance card and then cancel their policy.

The $7 million program is a joint effort among DPS, the Transportation Department, the Texas Department of Insurance and the insurance industry. It is being financed by vehicle registration fees. TexasSure requires all Texas insurance providers to supply a list of customers with up-to-date policies. The state then matches those policies to a driver’s license number, license plate number and vehicle identification number.

Under current law, drivers pulled over fora traffic violation who are found to be uninsured are ticketed $350 for the first offense, plus fees. Repeat offenders face fines of up to $1,000 and a two-year license suspension.

Yikes!  I’m not the only one.  Texas families saw their health insurance premiums soar 40 percent in five years – 10 times faster then their incomes increased, according to a report released today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., a national foundation that promotes health care improvement.

The foundations report, “Squeezed: How Costs for Insuring Families are Outpacing Income” was prepared by University of Minnesota researchers, did not study why premiums increase almost 30 percent nationally to an average of $10,728 in 2005.  In Texas, premiums jumped to an average $11,533.

Nationally, Texas ranked third behind Oklahoma and Idaho in premium increases from 2001 to 2005.  At the same time, Texas ranked No. 1 in the percentage of residents without insurance.  In 2005-2006 that figure was 27 percent and the state had 5.5 million of the nation’s 47 million uninsured people.

People without coverage often get expensive emergency room care, and those costs get passed on as higher premiums to people with insurance, says Regina Rogoff, the executive director of People’s Community Clinic which treats uninsured people in the Austin area.

Taxpayers also share the tab when hospitals and governments do more to help the uninsured according to Clarke Heidrick, a member of the Travis County Healthcare District Board.