I was very pleased by the attention John Schmeltzer gave my auto insurance plan recently, but I wanted to make a couple of clarifications.
The plan would not require an 18-year-old to pay $1,235 for a driver’s license as reported. My recommendation is that young people pay no more than anyone else-but that anyone, regardless of age, pay stiff surcharges when stopped for unsafe driving. Those surcharges would be added to the premium pool, most of it collected at the pump, to keep the cost of insurance down for safe drivers.
This would have the double advantage of not penalizing safe drivers just because they are young and giving all drivers a very real incentive to drive safely.
My comment was simply that if the people of Illinois wanted to charge young people more for being young, fine. I think that’s crazy (young people get older; it all evens out in the end)-but it could be done efficiently, without today’s expensive selling/underwriting system, simply by adding some huge extra fee, such as $1,200, to the cost of a young person’s license. But I sure don’t recommend that in Auto Insurance Alert!, the little non-profit paper that explains all this in detail.
