An alberta car insurance quote quiz to start the day:
1)In New Jersey, an car insurer is allowed to base your premium on:
A) Ancestry
B) Race
C) Occupation
D)Religion
2)In Pennsylvania, an car insurer can charge you more based on:
A)Sex
B) Family size
C) Education
D) Nationality
3) True or false? In New Jersey, at least one car insurer will charge more to cover a skilled craftsman or factory foreman than a commercial writer or graphic artist - even if both drivers are the same age, live in the same town, own the same car, and have identical driving records.
4)True or false? In Pennsylvania, at least one insurer charges more to cover a driver who didn't get past high school than a driver who has a bachelor's or graduate degree - even if they're otherwise identical.
5) True or false? New Jersey is an unusual state for car insurers.
If you answered C, C, True, True and True, pat yourself on the back. Then watch as a tempest over Geico's New Jersey pricing turns into a national storm, thanks largely to a little-known alberta car insurance quote executive named Eric Poe.
To be fair, New Jersey probably invited this storm in 2006 when it rewrote its alberta car insurance quote laws to loosen rules that insurers blamed for scaring off competitors and boosting prices.
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Officials virtually invited newcomers to seek an edge via two strategies common elsewhere: by drawing territories that deviated from the state's once-mandatory boundaries, and by using credit histories to predict risks.
Publicly, at least, little attention was paid to other aspects of the sophisticated-but-secretive pricing models that have moved into the alberta car insurance quote mainstream over the last decade.
But that changed abruptly last month when Eric Poe, vice president of N.J. Citizens United Reciprocal Exchange (NJCURE), a not-for-profit car insurer, became an unlikely whistleblower.
What Poe learned from another competitor and then shared with journalists and consumer activists was that Geico, one of the state's new entrants, has been setting rates with two tools that he and others found shocking: education and occupation.
All else being equal, Geico offers its best prices to people such as doctors, teachers and scientists, and to others with college educations. In the middle are technicians, clerical supervisors, and other white-collar workers less likely to need a bachelor's degree.
Charged top dollar - an average of about 40 percent more than the best-rated occupations, Poe estimates - are people such as postal and stock clerks, or "unskilled and semiskilled blue- or gray-collar workers," according to a Geico underwriting manual.
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But even more shocking to Poe is what he's learned since: that Geico's practices are not just apparently legal but increasingly widepread.
Since the Geico news broke, Poe says, he's discovered that Liberty Mutual also uses education as a factor in New Jersey. Allstate has said it is testing education and occupation in several Southern and Western states.
Other insurers have said they don't use such factors. But Poe, who says Geico's and Liberty Mutual's use is clear from their online price-quote tools, assumes the practice is more widespread than has been acknowledged.
Legislators in New Jersey are already seeking to ban it. With Poe, they say education and occupation can serve as a proxy for factors that are plainly abhorrent - such as charging people more based on income or race.
Poe was joined last week by Robert Hunter of the Consumer Federation of America in a letter to the National Association of alberta car insurance quote Commissioners, urging a national inquiry and ban. At the very least, Poe deserves credit for launching a national debate.
Insurers are allowed to discriminate legally, slicing the population to assess relative risk. But it's up to all of us to decide which slices are acceptable, and which are beyond the pale.
http://consumerwatch.blogspot.com