Wayne Goodwin who is the Insurance Commissioner is fighting to save his role as a regulatory authority to have a say in the car insurance rates. He states that the corporate greed is responsible for driving the auto insurance rates up. He also feels that if the pending bills are passed into law in the legislature then motorists will end up paying higher premiums.
However, insurers claim that they are not engineering anything to increase the auto insurance rates and on the contrary doing everything they can to bring down the auto insurance premiums for the customers. The proposal they say will ensure that the unfair system of giving subsidies for some drivers will come to an end.
If the bill is passed into a law in the Senate and the House then it would limit the ability of the state to regulate the auto insurance premiums. This would also help in removing the surcharge that the insured drivers have to pay in order to subsidize the liability cover of some drivers.
In a press conference held on Monday, Goodwin stated that the insurance companies wanted more of the people’s money and that these proposals would lead to a hike in auto insurance rates.
Stripping the insurance commissioner off his role in regulating the auto insurance rates has happened even four years ago when then Senate Majority Leader Tony Rand had first introduced a bill such as this. This effort by the legislature faced opposition by the consumer groups and it ended in the appointment of a separate commission which then studied the situation and took a comprehensive look at the whole situation.
Despite the fact that both the Republican-backed bills that have been introduced recently in the Senate had taken different approaches to regulate the auto insurance rates, Goodwin has not been able to differentiate between the two. One of the Republican-backed bills that have been introduced in the House resembles the one of the Senate bills.
According to the Department of Insurance the Commissioner’s role in the regulating the auto insurance rates has managed to keep the premiums low. The motorists in North Carolina were among the 10 lowest in the country in terms of the insurance premiums they were paying. This information was based on the data from National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
However, the insurance industry has insisted that the goal was not to hike the insurance premiums but to lower it by putting an end to the unfair schemes.
