The spiraling cost of car insurance.

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Author: Buckley Jr., W.F.

Dateline: NEW YORK, APRIL 29

At a recent mixer with automobile insurance specialists quite startling data arrested the attention. One woman recently bought a car in Philadelphia and found that the insurance premium she would need to pay exceeded the cost of the new car. She fiddled to the extent one can fiddle in Philadelphia, but inasmuch as her job required her to have a car, she finally yielded to the surmounting priority, which was to live within her budget. She accomplished this by moving out of Philadelphia.

The City of Brotherly Love is notorious among insurance underwriters, because so much do jurors there love any plaintiff, they tend to set him/her up for life if the complaint is of a bruised elbow. But therein lies a tale, a dark tale.

A recent poll by Roper confirmed what sophisticated in-surance agents knew. It is quite simply that we are breeding a race of cheaters. Thirty-two per cent of the Americaninsurance-buying public feels free to exaggerate the damage done in an accident at least to the extent of eliminating the deductible. If, say, your deductible is one thousand dollars, and the damage done in yesterday's little collision was one thousand dollars, you throw in as a casualty of yesterday's little collision the long neglected right rear fender that Sonny scratched backing into the garage last winter after a night of levity. The good news is that only 6 per cent of the American people will buy a car knowing that it has been stolen. The bad news is that 6 per cent of the American people will buy a car knowing that it has been stolen. The Americans of median conscience in such matters are the 23 per cent who are willing to lie about where they keep their car at night. They will say at home in their garage even though they don't have a garage, they park it outside. Cheaper rates.

Is this something new? Does it reflect a dissipation in American standards of honesty? You remember the old movie, The Grapes of Wrath, in which Henry Fonda drives his family through the Dust Bowl in his Model A Ford without even enough money to buy the kids a bowl of hot soup, and you know -- there is simply no doubt about it -- that that man would never cheat on any form he was asked to fill out. So what happened? Just the same kind of general decadence that gives us illegitimate children and Congress?

Well -- yes and no. True, American standards of ethical behavior in these matters aren't exemplary -- for instance, the same poll reveals that about 20 per cent of Americans are prepared to conceal a share of their income from the IRS, if they can get away with it.

But there is another factor that plays a role. A lot of Americans feel that insurance policies are being used as a form of redistribution. Mr. Eversocareful Jones, who takes meticulous care of his car, never drives home from a cocktail party, and has no teenage children, sees his insurance bill climb year after year. He asks his agent why this should be so, and the agent explains. At the simplest level, the cost of auto repairs has risen much more than the CPI. But then there is the rise in car theft, in wild urban driving, in teenage cruising, and above all in juries that deal with millions of dollars as though they were jelly beans. All of this means that the insurance companies have no alternative but to float out the added cost, raising the premiums for all the ships lying in the harbor, never mind the record of good behavior of individual shipowners.

So that the spur is to re-redistribute. To try to get back a part of what, in your judgment, you have had unfairly to contribute to other people's extravagances. And the easiest way is: to cheat.

What to do about it? Ideally, an insurance agent would take the time carefully to examine the background of every policy purchaser, but you can't hire Pinkerton to investigate everybody who wants car insurance. And 43 states require that you do have insurance, the idea being to protect not you, but your victim, when you run him over, or crash into his (empty?) garage.

It is a tricky business, and those who believe insurance companies are cleaning up on this mess can look at the figures. Last year, their profit was 9 per cent. About normal.

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By Wm. F. Buckley Jr.