One in four state drivers uninsured

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The man and his 3-year-old son were killed. Jones' 29-year-old daughter, Teryi, will suffer scars and pain for the rest of her life.

And she's still waiting for her insurance company to pay her hospital bills.

The other driver, Charles Bradley Elmore, 25, had no insurance.

"If the laws had been tougher, maybe the guy would not have been driving," Inez Jones said. "Maybe he and his 3-year-old son would still be alive."

Elmore's insurance status was no anomaly.

Every time you pull up to a four-way stop in South Carolina, the odds are good that one of the vehicles there will be uninsured.

The latest estimates, from 2001, show that 28 percent of the vehicles on the state's highways aren't covered by insurance, according to Beth Parks, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Actually, no one knows how many uninsured vehicles are on the road in South Carolina. That's because insurance companies aren't required to report to the state — except under certain rare circumstances — when someone allows their policy to lapse.

"What a lot of people do is they get their insurance, they get their insurance card, then they cancel their insurance," said Allison Wright, of the South Carolina Insurance News Service.

Jones didn't know that the driver involved in her daughter's accident was uninsured until she saw it on a police report.

"I thought, well, this is a mistake, because we have a law that says you have to carry insurance," she said. "Well, when I started checking, I was amazed at the stuff I was finding out."

Such as the gap in the flow of information between the insurance companies, the DMV and law enforcement.

The losers in this system are not just those who have accidents with uninsured drivers but everyone who pays for auto insurance in South Carolina. Motorists who pay for coverage against uninsured motorists have to bear the cost of the accidents caused by those offenders, which drives the cost of auto insurance up for everyone.

"When the public gets tired of paying the high insurance rates then they'll start pushing Columbia to enforce that law and get these people off the road," Jones said. "Then our insurance rates are going to go down, then more people can afford insurance."

Jones said she has called every legislator in the state, gotten herself appointed to a governor's task force on the issue and is doing everything she can to bring attention to the problem.

The problem with the system, according to her attorney, Joe Lyles, is that people who buy insurance to cover accidents with uninsured motorists find themselves in an adversarial relationship with their own insurance company.

"Sometimes you end up having to file a lawsuit, and they're actually hiring the lawyer who's fighting you," he said.

Slow in coming

The Legislature has made some attempts at rectifying the problem, although implementation of a new system — part of the DMV's infamous Project Phoenix — has been slow in coming.

A new system in the works will electronically link insurance companies with the DMV, giving the state a more accurate picture of how many vehicles aren't covered. Officials hope that will reduce the number of uninsured drivers on the road.

But when it comes to insurance, and government bureaucracy, nothing is as simple as it sounds.

Although the law calling for the new system was passed in 2002, it will be a year from now before it's fully implemented, because of the complexities of insurance documents and electronic interface between various computer systems, said Parks, the DMV spokeswoman.

A simple e-mail or phone call to the department wouldn't do, she said.

Some insurance companies do notify the DMV when policies lapse, even though they're not required to do so. Through that hit-and-miss method, the DMV suspended 33,875 license tags between June 30, 2002, and July 1 of this year, according to Sid Gaulden, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.

If DMV estimates are correct, there are about 1.2 million uninsured vehicles on the state's roads.

Still, a number of people get away with driving illegally.

"I guess that might be a good question for the people who do law enforcement," said Wright, the Insurance News Service spokeswoman.

But the Highway Patrol says it is doing what it's being asked to do. A team of 30 retired troopers who have come back to work at a lower pay rate has been assigned that job, Gaulden said.

Of those 33,875 cases handed over to the Highway Patrol during the past year, the "I-Team" confiscated 8,226 tags and cleared another 13,391 cases by getting the offenders to reinstate their insurance. The rest either couldn't be located or were issued tickets for suspended tags or other violations, Gaulden said.

A case could be made for troopers to run random checks on license tags to catch violators. But Gaulden said troopers don't have laptop computers to run checks themselves, and they're not supposed to trace tags without "probable cause" of a violation.

The small number of cases handed to law enforcement is a factor in the lack of a communication link between insurance companies and the DMV.

No ask, no tell

And that is a factor of state law, according to Eleanor Kitzman, president of Columbia-based Driver's Choice Insurance and a member of a group established by state law to help DMV improve the system.

"We're not going to report something that no one's asked for, and the DMV had no process in place to do anything with the information," she said.

State Rep. Dan Tripp, R-Mauldin, concedes that part of the problem has been due to the laws, but he says that's changed.

For one thing, the law that now requires car buyers to use an official temporary tag should keep some uninsured drivers off the road, he said.

Another change should eliminate a disconnect between law enforcement and the legal system over prosecuting cases, he said.

Under the old system, when drivers were stopped and charged with not having insurance, all they had to do was go to their insurance agent and pay to have it reinstated retroactive to the time it lapsed, show up in court, and the charge would be dropped, Tripp said.

"So basically what happened was law enforcement really lost the will to even work on that, to try to crack down on uninsured motorists, because they knew when they got to the courtroom they couldn't prosecute them," he said.

The new law, though, requires the violator to pay a fine for any lapse in coverage, Tripp said.

South Carolina, he said, is looking into the system used by North Carolina, which has an uninsured motorist rate of just 6 percent.

The Tar Heel State requires insurance companies to notify the DMV when people's insurance coverage lapses, and the DMV has the capability of checking to see if the person has insurance with another company, according to the North Carolina Department of Insurance.

Another reason North Carolina's uninsured motorist rate is lower could be the fact that its insurance premium costs are lower. North Carolina ranks 43rd among the states in insurance costs, with average premiums of $564.76, compared to South Carolina's ranking of 34th, at $616.87, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

A study done by the South Carolina Department of Insurance showed that South Carolina's rates could fall by as much as 25 percent if its uninsured vehicles rate were as low as North Carolina's.

Lesson to learn

A vast number of South Carolina drivers need to figure out that they must have insurance if they're going to drive, according to Andre Richburg, a Nationwide Insurance agent in Greenville.

"I think a lot of people don't understand insurance," he said. "People look at insurance as a nuisance rather than insurance as being something to protect you and your assets. And that's just a lack of education on the part of the general public."

Inez Jones plans to do just that — educate the public. She's working on a public relations campaign that aims to increase awareness of the problem, and show the costs it places on everyone.

"I have been getting literally hundreds of responses from people who were in an accident caused by an uninsured motorist and because their insurance companies did not pay as they went with the medical bills," she said.

Jones will be thinking of people like them as she fights for a better auto insurance system.

"They don't pay me in Columbia," she said, "so they can't fire me for jumping up and saying what's on my mind."