GEICO’S BLUE-COLLAR RATES CAUSE STIR

Education and occupation matter when it comes to what customers of New Jersey’s fourth-largest auto insurer pay, according to a published report. Geico considers professional and college-educated customers less of a risk than blue-collar workers, so those drivers pay less, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported.

“It is really unconscionable,” Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, executive director of New Jersey Citizen Action, told the newspaper. “I would love to know who they are marketing themselves to? Are they writing letters to doctors and lawyers? Everybody should be putting down that they are Rhodes scholars.”

Assemblyman Neil Cohen, D-Union County, said he will introduce a bill to ban the practice. “It is discriminatory, and it has no relationship to how somebody drives,” said Cohen, chairman of the Assembly Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee. “None of that should be considered.”

However, according to the Department of Banking and Insurance, using education and occupation to determine rates is acceptable if the company proves they correlate to losses. “They were able to justify it. We didn’t have a reason to say ‘No, you can’t,'” department spokeswoman Jaimee Gilmartin said. “I don’t know that we’ve gotten a single question or complaint with regard to use of education or occupation.”

The Star-Ledger of Newark found that a 30-year-old single, male lawyer with a master’s degree would pay $1,686 a year for coverage from Geico, but $2,880 if he was a janitor with a high school diploma.

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