Insurers' Road Service Could Prove Costly (FYI insurance db

[wakeme2008]

http://www.tampatrib.com/MGBIMO9K8HE.html

Dec 15, 2005
Insurers' Road Service Could Prove Costly
By RANDY DIAMOND
[email protected]


TAMPA - Andrea Davis can't understand what two flat tires and leaving the keys in her car have to do with being rejected for auto insurance.

The answer lies in the optional emergency road service coverage the Lutz resident was persuaded to buy from her insurer, Geico, for $12 a year. The bargain rate, one-fifth the cost of emergency road service from AAA, turned out to be no bargain at all.

Davis, 31, discovered how costly her Geico emergency road service was when she shopped for an insurer that could beat the $1,400 a year she paid Geico for coverage on her 1999 Isuzu Rodeo. Florida's largest auto insurer, State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Co., beat the price by several hundred dollars but rejected her because she had excessive road service calls under her Geico policy.

..cut..

If I had known it would have affected my ability to get insurance, I would have paid $60 to get AAA," Davis said.

AAA (American Automobile Association) doesn't report its road service calls to an outside company, but insurers do.

..more at article...

[Ian David]

1. Geico vs Progressive

Geico
$1,190 to Democrats
$17,661 to Republicans
$0 to Others
$18,849 in Total Contributions

http://www.buyblue.org/node/981/view/summary


Progressive Insurance
$3,704,167 to Democrats
$116,146 to Republicans
$0 to Others
$3,820,313 in Total Contributions

http://www.buyblue.org/node/1685/view/summary


American Automobile Association (AAA)
Zero contributions to either party
http://www.buyblue.org/node/79/view/summary


Driving for Progress Wrap Up
Campaigns
Posted by Raven on September 13, 2005 - 11:48am

On February 23rd, 2005 we started a campaign we called "Driving for Progress". In that campaign we encouraged BuyBlue readers to find out how Progressive Auto Insurance stacked up in terms of complaints and price in their state.

We recommended them because they are the only "Blue" auto insurance company we have found to date. In addition to their political contributions, their chairman Peter Lewis has been heavily involved in funding the intellectual future of the left along with people like George Soros.

We determined that nationwide the average annual insurance premium was $1000. We wanted to see if we could track how many people changed their auto insurance to Progressive Insurance, and we decided to do this by asking people to email us when they made the switch.

Auto insurance is something that you don't want to change every day and over the course of the past 6 months I think we've seen quite a shift. When the campaign ended shortly before the new web site launched we had recorded that about $325,000 had been shifted from red insurance companies to Progressive Insurance.

That might not seem like much when you compare it to their bottom line, but it is a significant number. Furthermore that is only the reported number, over that 6 month time period it is a certainty that many readers saw our campaign, acted on it and didn't inform us about it. It is also important to note that absolutely no advertising was behind this number, it all came from word of mouth and chance.

In the future we plan to run other focused campaigns like this. I would personally chalk this one up as a success. We also have more ambitious plans to provide a counter for all purchases shifted from red companies to blue companies to expand on this concept. For example if you spent $50 at Barnes & Noble instead of Amazon.com then you could update the counter to include your $50. This would steadily tick up just like many of the national debt and Iraq war cost counters we are all familiar with.

So thank you if you participated and let us know about your switch, it is very important to have these kind of statistics.

More:
http://www.buyblue.org/node/2428