We feel compelled to address an issue that should concern every Minnesotan who owns an automobile. This past fall a valiant group of high school students completed some extremely important research with regard to no-fault insurance, which every auto owning Minnesotan is forced to obtain. Their findings revealed that every auto owning Minnesotan could be saving approximately $300 per year on their insurance coverage costs if no-fault was dropped from the statutes of Minnesota law. Our neighboring states of Iowa, Wisconsin, North Dakota and South Dakota have no such laws and are currently saving their auto owners millions of dollars. In fact, Colorado recently removed their no-fault law from their statutes, saving their auto owners approximately 25 percent. Why does Minnesota still have no-fault on their statutes? We call it stupidity and we urge all Minnesotans to write members of the “Commerce Committee” to have this costly insurance coverage removed from the Minnesota Statutes. Those members are as follows: Linda Scheid (chairperson), Dan Sparks (vice chairperson), Mady Reiter (ranking minority member), Ellen Anderson, William Belanger, Jr., David Larson, Brian LeClair, Becky Lourey, James P. Metzen, Geoff Michel, Sandy Pappas, Lawrence Pogemiller and Ann Rest. When we contacted our 18th District Sen. Steve Dille, this is the response that we received: “Opponents argued that ‘no-fault’ insurance guarantees medical treatment for those without health coverage when in an auto accident.” In other words, everyone in Minnesota who owns, drives and insures a car/truck is subsidizing people who do not have health insurance. This is plain nonsense. These costs should not be born by all who drive. Sen. Michel sponsored a bill to repeal the current “no-fault” legislation and it failed and never got out of committee. We believe that there are too many good things for Minnesotans that die in committee. We contend that legislators are being bought off by insurance companies better known as lobbies. It is time that Minnesota take control of their own destiny and not have legislators making important decisions like this for them. We would also like to reveal that after we wrote to Sen. Dille, we requested that he supply us the names of this “Commerce Committee.” He didn’t. Instead, he wrote, “I, (Steve Dille) appreciate hearing your comments about the no-fault insurance proposal. Since I do not sit on that committee, I did not have a chance to vote. I believe the issue will come up again next year, and maybe this time it will move forward.” Sen. Dille evidently doesn’t care, giving such a response. We do care and feel that such people should not represent us and that we (the entire auto owners community) should work hard for their defeat in the next election. The cancer needs to be removed and we urge all Minnesota drivers to exercise their right to vote all the members of the “Commerce Committee” out of office.
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