[masraum]

Originally Posted by KNS

A while back I posted here about my rising car insurance premium on my daily driver Volkswagen. I received the latest bill for my new premium and it has gone up significantly again (I have a clean record with no claims in 17 years). For as long as I've been driving, until recently my premiums have always gone down as the vehicle got older.

I have been told by State Farm that it is primarily because of the natural disasters in certain states that rates go up nationwide. This same theme has been reported in the news as well.

I'll throw this out there - should the whole country pick up the tab for those that choose to live in disaster prone areas?
Are the insurance companies using this as an excuse to raise our rates?

I think the reason that you've been given is a load of crap. I think it's because they know they can get away with that reason.

Many years ago, I think the late 80s, the cost of automotive anti-freeze went way, way up, like from $1-2/gal to $5-6 (or something rediculous, it's been a long time). THe reason is that 4 out of 5 factories had catastrophic issues (fires or something). I was told that FLAPS stores got letters from Prestone saying "don't worry, we're not going to raise prices and availability won't suffer because our last factory can maintain the supply." But that didn't stop folks from jacking up the prices.
I'm sure that we've all seen similar events in the past 5 - 10 years, where price goes way up for some reason, but then doesn't go back down to the original levels because suppliers realize that people can/will pay.