There are a little over two weeks left in the legislative session, and several bills aimed at bringing down Louisiana’s extremely high auto insurance rates are nearing final legislative passage. Senate Insurance Chairman Kirk Talbot led the effort on the Senate floor to pass a bill that would give the insurance commissioner more authority to reject rate increases. Talbot says an amendment was added to the legislation that would require insurance companies to make their rate filing requests public.
“The commissioner now is the one who decides what information is propriety when insurance companies files for increases or decreases, so insurance commissioner is the one who decides if that information is propriety or not,” Talbot said.
Insurance companies and Insurance Commissioner Tim Temple oppose the bill that’s backed by Governor Jeff Landry. Temple has called the bill over regulation, which insurance companies do not favor.
And before taking a break for the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the Louisiana Senate approved several tort reform bills. Talbot says that includes a medical transparency bill.
“It sounds crazy that we do not have this already, but the jury and the judge can see all the medical bills so they can make an accurate determination on what plaintiff should get to pay for its medical bills,” Talbot said.
But Alexandria Senator Jay Luneau is not a believer that tort reform legislation is the answer to lower auto insurance rates.
“The reason for that because is that for the last four years we’ve done similar measures on tort reform just about everyway you can think of and tort reform has never lowered insurance rates,” Luneau said.
A tort reform bill that needs House concurrence to Senate changes before reaching the governor’s desk would say if a driver is found to be 51-percent or more at fault for a wreck, they are not entitled to any damages in a civil lawsuit. Luneau says it’s a bad bill.
“We’ll see juries come in and say all we have to do is find this person is 51% or more at fault and they don’t have to collect anything and they will use that as a weapon in some instances and I think that’s going to be difficult,” Luneau said.
Luneau says he has two bills that will go before House Insurance on Wednesday that he believes will help to lower rates. One of them makes it illegal for insurance companies to adjust an adjuster’s report without the knowledge of the adjuster or policy holder. He says this was a big problem following the hurricanes in 2020.
The senator also has a bill that prohibits the use of credit scores when factoring insurance rates.
“Hopefully that will stop insurance companies from increasing some of these peoples insurance premiums because they have poor credit,” Luneau said.
The legislative session must conclude on June 12th.
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