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Mississippi Auto Insurance Verification Program Shelved


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LOS ANGELES--April 6, 2011: A legislative effort aimed at tempering Mississippi's high rate of drivers without auto insurance was dealt a setback last week when Gov. Haley Barbour announced he was vetoing a bill that would have established a state-run verification system to identify and cite uninsured motorists. According to a 2009 report from the Insurance Research Council (IRC), Mississippi has one of the highest uninsured-driver rates in the country. The IRC estimated that, in 2007, about 28 percent of the state's drivers lacked coverage.

OnlineAutoInsurance.com advocates that all drivers purchase at least basic liability insurance in order to comply with state law, to protect their financial assets and to ensure that any parties involved in an accident will have their medical and property-repair bills at least partially covered. A low down payment auto insurance policy, offered by many insurers, can help individuals get protected quickly with minimal start-up costs.

Although Gov. Barbour has vetoed the legislation, he expressed in his veto message that he objected to particular parts of the bill's language, not the concept of a verification system itself.

The verification system would have established a database containing policy information provided by insurers that would have been synced up with registration information. The system could be used so that law enforcement officers could verify in the field whether a particular driver had coverage and so that a policy could be verified before registration is issued for a vehicle.

Gov. Barbour noted, though, that there had been insufficient analysis of the costs of the system and that the legislative language required the Department of Public Safety to perform duties beyond its scope of responsibility. Barbour wrote he would be more receptive of a bill that has resolved these issues.

To learn more about this and other car insurance issues, readers can go to Online Auto Insurance where visitors will find informative resource pages and a quote-comparison generator that can help consumers in any state find a policy with low up-front costs.