EDITORIAL: Our view: Would higher car insurance rates be worth reducing possible discrimination? [The Observer, La Grande, Ore.]

Dec. 2—Oregon allows insurers to use credit history, gender, marital status, education, profession, employment status and more to determine how much to charge for car insurance.

Are those things directly linked to how well you drive? No.

Do they help insurers gauge how much risk a driver may pose? Insurers believe so.

Two bills earlier this year proposed stripping insurers from being able to use those factors to set premiums. Instead, insurers would have to focus on driving record, miles driven and years of driving experience. Apparently the idea is going to be revived in a bill for the short 2022 session.

Is it the right thing to do? It's not simple.

Gov. Kate Brown and Oregon's Department of Consumer and Business Services backed those bills. Much of the department's argument focused on credit scores. A low credit score can mean a person pays more for insurance even if their driving record is clean. There's also concern that using credit scores can be discriminatory. Black and Latino drivers are more likely than others to have lower credit scores. Similar arguments about discrimination were also made about allowing insurers to use education, employment status and occupation.

The department also challenged the assumption that gender should be considered. For instance, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has said that both men and women are equally likely to be distracted drivers. As for marital status, a person is not necessarily a poorer driver because their spouse died or they went through a divorce.

What would such changes mean for the insurance industry? Other states, such as California, have restricted what information insurers can use. The department argued the insurance industry is still strong.

There are, though, other things to consider. It would mean premiums would go up for many Oregonians. The department says people with good or excellent credit ratings would face increases and people with poor credit scores would pay less. "The reduction in cost for people with poor scores is four times the increase in premiums for people with good or excellent scores," according to a chart the department provided.

Some people in Oregon also get discounts because of their membership in a labor union or other groups. Those would be eliminated. That's part of the reason the Oregon Coalition of Police and Sheriffs have opposed such changes.

Lawrence Powell, an insurance analyst at the University of Alabama, insisted in testimony to the Legislature the predictors the insurance industry uses are accurate and help match premiums to risk. They aren't perfect. They do help. Occupation and education can help reveal things that are difficult to observe such as risk tolerance. Gender and marital status also can correlate with miles driven, and when and where people drive. He also said if Oregonians purchased their insurance in California, which has many of the policies in the bills, they would have paid more by about 7%.

It's not easy to know who will be a safe driver. Should the state of Oregon dictate how insurance businesses can evaluate drivers? Tell you legislators what you think. You can find them here: oregonlegislature.gov/FindYourLegislator/leg-districts.html.

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