Online Auto Insurance Informs Consumers on Gender Rating

Detroit -- Free-Press-Release.com-- Mar 2, 2011 -- By the end of next year, auto insurance companies providing coverage in the European Union will be required to cease using a prospective policyholder’s gender to help determine how much to charge him or her for a policy. This comes after the practice, which has been around for decades in Europe, was ruled this week by the EU’s highest court to be unfairly discriminatory.

News of the ban may have drivers on the other side of the Atlantic wondering, “Does my insurer charge me a higher or lower rate based on whether I’m a man or a woman?”

The answer to that question is usually yes, according to one of the latest FAQs published by the writers at OnlineAutoInsurance.com. Since regulation of car insurance rates is not up to the federal government, states have been left to determine which rating factors are appropriate for their residents, and 45 of them and the District of Columbia have decided that gender is an acceptable aspect to be included in insurers’ rating calculations.

Insurers cannot use gender, though, to help determine prices for car insurance in Michigan, Massachusetts, Montana, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In these states, the practice is banned either through state regulation, like in Massachusetts, or by legal precedent, as is the case in Pennsylvania.

Generally, the practice is defended by the fact that statistics show that men—particularly young men—are simply more likely to get into car accidents than their female counterparts are. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, male drivers were involved in about 5.34 million accidents in 2009, while women were involved in only about 4.1 million during the same period.

Source: http://www.nhtsa.gov/

To learn more about this and other insurance issues, readers can go to http://www.onlineautoinsurance.com/michigan/ where visitors will find informative resource articles and a quote-comparison generator that can help consumers find the lowest prices for coverage. To access the full FAQ, visitors can click on the “Questions” link located at the top of any page on the site.

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Online Auto Insurance, LLC
Benjamin Zitney
http://www.onlineautoinsurance.com/