I have been away for sometime in dealing with the detailed problems of auto insurance in Canada and today as I read the article "Insurers doing us no favours" I am once again very respectful of the intelligence shown by the author Lorie Terry.

Auto insurance costs are going up and as a consequence Terry explains how the insurance industry wants to streamline their costs by streamlining their services, that is calling for the elimination or capping of compensation for pain and suffering and economic loss along with the calling for the medical assistance of their exclusive industrial doctors and their coercive manufacturing rehabilitation programs.

The issue of auto insurance is metaphorically no different from health insurance and the first concern on the proper coverage and administration are not one of controlling costs, but one of social need. In the last twenty years we have experienced the corporative trend to control costs and the corporative greed to make fast money, and as a consequence we are faced today with a dislocation between auto insurance coverage and auto insurance needs. Terry is right in mentioning that the auto insurance premiums are subsidizing the bad investments of the insurance industry as the recent collapse of the stock market has been caused by the speculative competition of the insurance industry as well.

Terry also mentions the new buzzword of the insurance industry "streamlining" that is the draconian simplistic cutting of insurance coverage to control costs. I used the word "streamline" in September 1981 when working for the Saskatchewan Health-Care Association I implemented the first computerized pension option system to comply with the then new 1981 Saskatchewan Pension Legislation. The computer I used was a Commodore computer with a 32K of internal memory.

Our language is changing for the worse, I used the word "streamline" as an opportunity to be innovative and more intelligent, and now, twenty-two years later, we have the insurance use of this same word "streamline" as an opportunity to be regressive and less intelligent.

References

Pertinent articles published in Ensign

Johnstone, Bruce Public or private? A no-brainer, says SGI. Commercial firms dispute the claim (PDF) June 23, 2003 Leader-Post http://www.ftlcomm.com:16080/ensign/desantisArticles/2003_800/desantis810/privateOrpublicLP.pdf

Terry, Lorie Insurers doing us no favours (PDF) July 02, 2003 The Leader-Post http://www.ftlcomm.com:16080/ensign/desantisArticles/2003_800/desantis810/terryLP.pdf

The Coalition Against No Fault http://www.againstnofault.ca/aboutus.html