Debate continues over how to lower La. auto insurance costs

Photo Credit: News Radio 710 KEEL

Published: April 28, 2020

By: Catherine Hunt, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE —The biggest auto insurance companies, including State Farm, Allstate and GEICO, have announced temporary cost cuts and rebates of 15% to 25% for customers in Louisiana since the coronavirus has kept drivers off the roads.

The savings are a welcome relief for the state’s roughly 3 million insured drivers, who together pay the second-highest costs in the country, following only Michigan residents. And Republicans in the state Legislature say they are looking for solutions that could permanently reduce car insurance rates through “tort reform,” changes that could reduce the number of lawsuits filed over accidents and the size of some of the damage awards.

“I know that insurance companies have given rebates because less people are driving, but we’re still the second highest in the country, and that’s not going to change,” said Sen. Kirk Talbot, R-River Ridge. “There is more of a need for this kind legislation now than before because of the coronavirus.”

The legislative session convened March 9, the same day that Gov. John Bel Edwards announced the state’s first confirmed case of COVID-19. The session was suspended a week later, and lawmakers hope to return to the Capitol in May to pass a new budget. They also would like to consider economic relief measures, either then or in a special session later this year, and that could include tort reform.

Republicans have long pushed for such changes. Talbot, who now chairs the Senate Insurance Committee, sponsored a bill last year that passed the Republican-controlled House. But it failed in a Senate committee amid questions by Democrats and other critics about whether the changes really would lower costs and be fair to people injured in car wrecks.

Louisiana’s rate of car cashes is on par with the rest of the country, but the rate of bodily injury claims is nearly double the national average. Talbot blames the state’s legal climate, contending that “there are things in our tort system that make us very unique to the rest of the country.”

“The data proves that those things are creating an environment where these bodily injury claims are double the national average and causing premiums to go up and insurance companies to leave,” he said.