Affordable Insurance

I disagree strongly with your Feb. 4 editorial, “Auto Insurance Reform for Poor,” which advocates subsidies to fix auto insurance rates at $300 per year for people making less than $20,000 per year.

May I propose an alternative that makes insurance more affordable, benefits the poor more than the rich and provides incentives to reduce driving? We should add a new gasoline (and diesel fuel) tax that is used to match the first $500 of car insurance. This would cut the cost for most people with minimal insurance in half. Everyone who buys auto insurance would receive the same benefits.

I don’t have numbers on how may people buy auto insurance and how many gallons of fuel are sold in the state to calculate the tax. However, if you drive 10,000 miles per year in a car that gets 20 miles per gallon, you will break even with a tax of $1 per gallon. I’m sure that there are more than 500 gallons of fuel sold per year per insured driver, which should make the tax less than that.

JOSEPH AREEDA

Los Angeles

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The $300 basic automobile insurance policy proposed by Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) misses the point. Why should the poor, with a per capita income of $7,299, have to buy a liability policy? This would only protect them should they injury someone or damage someone’s property. Let’s drop the mandatory auto insurance requirement. We will always have uninsured drivers or drivers with limits so woefully low as to make them useless. That is why we purchase insurance to protect us from the uninsured.

How about a $300 policy that would provide, say, $5,000 for medical expenses and $2,500 for collision damage to their own car? Now, that would be a policy that would actually provide a benefit to the poor and a policy that they may actually want to purchase.

CLARK F. JACKSON

Glendora