Seen in the Courant:
Currently, the state requires you to have a policy covering at least $20,000 of “bodily injury liability” for each person you injure, with a total of $40,000 per accident. The policy also must cover at least $10,000 of property damage you cause.
The proposal, if passed by the House and Senate, would raise the minimums to $40,000 per person for injury and $50,000 per accident. And you’d have to have at least $20,000 of liability coverage to cover property damage you cause.
40/50/20? That’s an odd set of limits.
I’ll agree with the idea that 20/40/10 minimum limits doesn’t exactly provide a lot of coverage. While it’ll cover the majority of fender bender, bruse-y type accidents, anything more serious can quickly elevate beyond those levels….or even beyond 40/50/20, for that matter.
It’s true that this means that minimum limits coverage will necessarily become more expensive because of the additional coverage to be provided. There’s also a subtle complication caused by virtue of the election of minimum limits being a very predictive indicator of risk.
(In English: Folks who buy coverage just to get their tags tend to have worse loss experience than those who signal that they are attempting to protect themselves by electing higher optional limits.)
Auto insurance prices are perpetually a politically sensitive topic in Connecticut…so it’ll be interesting to pay attention to the debate on the subject.
