A rate decrease announced by the New York State Insurance Department could affect some young drivers, especially those with little driving experience and/or unclean driving records.

Superintendent of Insurance Howard Mills recently announced that the department approved an average 5.6 percent decrease in auto insurance premiums for drivers in New York's Automobile Insurance Plan, also known as the assigned risk plan.

The New York plan consists of policyholders who are unable to obtain insurance in the voluntary market, generally because they have poor driving records, little or no prior driving experience or a high frequency of claims.

According to Wayne Cotter, a spokesman for the state's Insurance Department, 16 percent of those in the assigned risk plan in 2002 were under the age of 24.

The new rate schedule for the plan takes effect Sunday for new business and March 1 for renewal business. It represents a cumulative dollar savings of about $28 million for the plan's policyholders, according to the department.

"Rates are dropping," he said. "There have been some changes in no-fault insurance laws and also a lot of fraud has been fought and won, both of which are reducing expenses."

The Insurance Department attributed this year's auto rate reductions to a number of events: increased efforts at combating fraud, which led to a record number of arrests resulting from investigations launched by the Department's Frauds Bureau; the willingness of more district attorneys to prosecute no-fault auto insurance fraud cases and a series of innovative regulatory reforms.

Kallman said more companies, such as Progressive auto insurance, are more likely now to insure teen drivers with little or no experience, therefore the number of teens in the assigned risk plan is not as significant as it used to be.

In fact, according to the state's Insurance Department, hundreds of thousands of drivers today are securing auto insurance through voluntary carriers when compared to a decade ago, demonstrating the competitiveness of New York's marketplace. Enrollment in the Automobile Insurance Plan stood at 196,620 as of Oct. 31, as compared to more than a million in the early 1990s.

Still, Tom Sipos, vice president of Sipos Insurance in the Town of Poughkeepsie, warned that someone with poor credit or a bad driver's record could end up paying more for car insurance, especially those under 19.

Danielle Abrams, a 17-year-old Wappinger resident, was lucky. When she passed her driver's test in September, her parents offered to put her on their auto insurance policy.

"Any time you have a new driver you are always concerned that poor judgment or inexperience is going to cause an accident. That's why we put her in all the education we could — like drivers ed — in order to minimize risks," Marianne Abrams said.

"What parents need to be concerned about is that they must see that their youngsters get a lot of driving experience with supervision. Any time we learn anything new it takes time to do it over and over again until it becomes second nature," Sipos said.

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