INSURERS LAUD PA. SESSION:

The 2003-04 session of the Pennsylvania General Assembly adjourned in the early hours of Nov. 21 to conclude what the property/casualty industry’s American Insurance Association (AIA) described as a successful and productive legislative session. “AIA accomplished a lot during this session with the passage of several key bills affecting virtually every segment of the property/casualty industry, including consumers,” said Taylor Cosby, AIA vice president, mid-Atlantic region. Enactment of SB 815, which was signed into law by Gov. Ed Rendell (D) in June, marked the successful conclusion of a multi-year effort to fix problems arising from the Reliance Insurance Company insolvency. The “large deductible law,” as it is known, produces significant savings for insurers (estimated to total $600 million) by changing the way that payments made to insolvent insurance companies are handled by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Also noteworthy is the passage of SB 8, which makes significant changes to the commonwealth’s drunk driving laws, including lowering the legal blood-alcohol level for driving under the influence of alcohol from .10 percent to .08 percent. The bill creates a first-in-the-nation drunk driving law that imposes increasingly harsher penalties on drunk drivers based on their blood-alcohol content (BAC). “Drunk driving costs Pennsylvanians more than $8 billion in economic losses annually. That adds up to $665 per person or 2.3 percent of the commonwealth’s personal income,” explained David Snyder, AIA vice president. “The costs of drunk driving are paid by the public through personal tragedy, loss of employee productivity, higher taxes and higher insurance premiums. Seldom can all of these issues be dealt with at one time, but they are all addressed in this important legislation,” Snyder said. Insurers were also pleased that an attempt to fund mass transit through a proposed 140 percent increase in the cost of obtaining motor vehicle records was defeated.