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Should It Be Illegal For People To Drive Without Vehicle Insurance?
Article by Danny Aaron
There are many drivers on the road who drive un-roadworthy vehicles. The worst part is not that they are putting themselves in danger, but other innocent road users too. Over and above vehicles that are being driven whilst not in a roadworthy state, there are also people who drive on our roads without motor insurance.
In some countries, vehicle insurance is required by law, but unfortunately, not in South Africa. It is a debate amongst many people about whether or not vehicle insurance should be absolutely mandatory. Naturally, there are people on both sides of the fence. Firstly, you will get all the insured people who believe that everyone else should be insured too. Their reasoning is that why should their insurance have to pay out for damages on their vehicle if the accident was caused by someone else? It is costing insured people thousands when they have to fork out for repairs on other people’s vehicles! Then you get the people who do not have car insurance. Some of them just cannot afford it, whilst others feel that it is an unnecessary monthly expense for something that could never happen.
Irrespective of which side of the fence you are on, it has to be taken into consideration that car insurance is mandatory in other countries for a reason. It is quite frankly very dangerous to drive without it! Imagine you are in a collision without motor insurance, and the accident was your fault. Do you have the spare money available to pay for the repairs to your motor vehicle AND the damages you caused to another vehicle. If you caused a bad accident, you may even be sued by the other party. This means that you will have to come up with a lot of extra money. It is better to protect your financial future by investing in a good car insurance policy. Even if you cannot afford to pay for a full comprehensive policy, you may be able to afford a good third party policy. A third party policy will pay out for any damages you cause to another vehicle if you are in a collision.
If you think about it logically, it really should be illegal for people to drive without a good motor insurance policy in place. If road users are not responsible enough to protect their financial future and the money they spent on the car, then they should not be on the road. There is a valid reason why motor insurance is compulsory in some countries, and also why most vehicle financing companies will not allow you to purchase a vehicle without insuring it first.
You can easily find good, reliable and affordable vehicle insurance companies on the internet. If you put a good security system on your vehicle, then your premium will be even lower! Furthermore, shopping around for some quotes will help you to find the lower premium available to you.
About the Author
Are you looking for reliable, affordable vehicle insurance? Look no further than http://www.payasyoudrive.co.za.
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health insurance Uninsured drive up hospital costs
The number of uninsured hospital admissions in Hamilton County more than doubled between 2004 and 2008, leaving local hospitals with barely three in 10 patients who have private insurance to pay for their care, according to a new report on health in the Chattanooga region.
The loss of commercially insured patients, whose insurance payments are significantly higher than those of government-sponsored insurance for the same services and treatments, has contributed to hospitals’ staggering losses to charity care.
In Hamilton County, hospital charity care losses totaled nearly million in 2008, compared to million in 2004.
More than million of the losses that year were absorbed by Erlanger Health System, Chattanooga’s safety net hospital.
Hospitals have felt the pain of providing more and more uncompensated care, said Craig Becker, president of the Tennessee Hospital Association.
But the pain doesn’t stop there. Employers and individual consumers are feeling it in the wallet, too.
As providers are forced to cost-shift their losses from uninsured patients to commercially insured patients, private insurers have raised their monthly rates to customers, contributing to more employers and individuals being unable to afford private insurance, Becker said.
“The big problem we’ve seen is nobody wants to pay for health insurance,” he said. “It’s kind of a death spiral of, the more people dropped (from insurance), the higher the commercial rates go, the more people dropped.”
Even as total hospital admissions declined by a few percentage points, uninsured admissions grew 123 percent between 2004 and 2008, driven by both cuts to TennCare and recent losses in employer-sponsored health care due to the economic recession, according to the report compiled by the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies and released today.
The annual Ochs report focuses on health in the six-county metro region including Hamilton, Marion and Sequatchie counties in Tennessee, and Catoosa, Dade and Walker counties in Georgia.
The 2010 report provides a sobering overview of local health statistics, from high smoking and obesity rates, to an age-adjusted death rate that exceeds the national average, and one of the state’s highest infant mortality rates, in Hamilton County.
“We tend to focus on those areas where it appears Chattanooga and Hamilton County lag, because from our perspective that means there’s an opportunity” for improvement, said David Eichenthal, president and CEO of the Ochs Center.
The report gives a detailed picture of the local health care system on the eve of the implementation of federal reforms, and on the heels of a severe economic downturn. A breakdown of who is paying for hospital patients’ care shows patients’ heavy reliance on government-funded health insurance.
Nearly two-thirds of 2008 hospital admissions were covered by government-sponsored health care: either TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program; Medicare, the federal program for the elderly; or Cover Tennessee, the report said.
Across the six-county metro region, 16.3 percent of people were enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program. One in four people in Sequatchie County get their health care through TennCare.
Emergency rooms locally also are experiencing a shift as the number of uninsured emergency department visits rose from 24,797 in 2004, to 40,140 in 2008, an increase of 61 percent. Visits from those with private coverage dropped from 70,534 to 67,605 in the same period.
Local emergency physician David Seaberg pointed out that total emergency room visits increased by 7.8 percent in that time period. However, the disproportionate rise in uninsured ER visitors could indicate that more uninsured people are skipping routine care and allowing illnesses to worsen into true emergencies, he said.
“You’re seeing the uninsured are often probably sicker when they go in, because they don’t have insurance and they do wait” to see a doctor, said Seaberg, who is dean of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga.
The hospital industry supported the health care legislation passed into law in March, which is expected to bring millions of people into the private or public insurance marketplace, Becker said. But even if more people get covered, hospitals are still worried about low reimbursement rates from public programs like TennCare, which already play a major role in community hospitals’ budgets, he said. Today TennCare only pays 64 percent of a hospitals’ costs to provide care, he said.
“While it’s coverage, it’s problematic in terms of we still would have to do cost shifting,” he said.
DEATH TRENDS
Many of the major killers in the county are related to lifestyle factors, such as smoking and maintaining an unhealthy body-mass index. Of the 3,239 Hamilton County