European Auto Insurance Cos. to Lose Sex-Rating Ability

While the decision is a large one in the EU, using sex to rate drivers has been banned in Pennsylvania since 1988.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) March 1, 2011 --Insurers in the European Union member states will no longer be able to include a prospective policyholder’s sex in their rating calculations starting December 2012, after a high court decision handed down on Tuesday established that pricing policies differently for men and women was unfairly discriminatory.

The decision is being considered a landmark case that—depending on which side one takes—either judiciously levels the playing field or wrongly bars insurers from using potent statistics to better price their product. But Pennsylvania auto insurance law has for more than two decades barred coverage providers from using sex as a rating factor when pricing policies.

Pennsylvania insurers lost the ability to incorporate sex into personal car insurance policy price calculations back in 1988. In that year, the decision in the court case Bartholomew v. Foster established that adjusting insurance rates based on sex violated equal rights provisions in the state constitution. The court delivered this decision while acknowledging that sex was a viable contributor in the prediction of driver risk.

Source: http://www.insurance.pa.gov

But the Keystone State is not the only place in America where sex-based rating has been banned. Michigan, Massachusetts, Montana and North Carolina all list it as one of the factors that coverage providers cannot base rates on, in whole or in part.

In the rest of the states, sex is considered an actuarially sound risk factor that insurance companies are permitted to use when deciding how much to charge a customer for a policy.

To learn more about this and other Pennsylvania coverage issues, readers can go to http://www.onlineautoinsurance.com/pennsylvania/ where they will find informative resource pages as well as a free-to-use quote-comparison generator that can help residents of Pennsylvania or any state find the lowest rate for coverage.

More information can be found online at http://www.onlineautoinsurance.com/