Some big city mayors and urban legislators say insurance rates are unfair to people who live in cities. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports, state legislatures are reluctant to change insurance rate structures in fear of angering suburban voters:
Transcript
Some big city mayors and urban legislators say insurance rates are unfair
to people who live in cities. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports, state
legislatures are reluctant to change insurance rate structures in fear of
angering suburban voters:
Insurance rates are higher in cities than they are in suburbs. Often
they’re much higher. Peter Kuhnmuench is an insurance industry
spokesman with the Insurance Institute of Michigan. He says there are
more risks and more insurance claims in the cities that drive up the costs.
“We see a higher incidence of fire and burglary and theft in the urban
areas typically than you do in the suburban areas.”
And although suburban residents typically drive their cars farther to
work, drivers in the city have more collisions and theft claims.
Legislators in cities want the insurance costs tp be spread out across a wider
population, but suburban legislators don’t want their residents to have to
subsidize urban insurance rates. Those in the city say the irony is:
through tax dollars, their residents are forced to subsidize more lanes of traffic for
the suburbanites who commute to work in the city.
For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.