At 67, Ifraj Schkoor, a longtime Detroit resident like most people her age anywhere would be expected to live a comfortable life with fewer hassles and struggles in the daily challenges of survival.
A retired licensed practical nurse, Schkoor has seen a lot of political gamesmanship in Detroit to the extent that politics now is something that she tries to avoid because according to her “it aggravates me,” the kind of skepticism most Detroiters hold about their elected officials.
And the reason politics aggravates people like Schkoor is because she has seen how politicians in Detroit rail against issues like insurance redlining and end up doing nothing about it. She has witnessed how elected officials spend time agonizing over such issues but offer no realistic solution to the problem.
So when Mayor Mike Duggan talks about the D-Insurance proposal, a measure to address the exorbitant car insurance rates in the city, Schkoor greeted the mayor’s proposal with the same skepticism she did with past officials.
“This is not anything new,”Schkoor said in an interview with the Chronicle. “If it can be implemented and can bring down rates, it is a good idea.”
That’s because Schkoor, like most Detroiters, knows firsthand the cost of insurance redlining. She has a 1999 Oldsmobile Alero that she can’t drive because she can’t afford the $300 monthly premium on it just for no-fault coverage, not even full coverage.
“My car is 15 years old and they want to charge me 300 dollars just for no fault. I don’t even have full coverage. They (insurance company) want 1800 dollars every six months. How can someone with a Social Security check afford that?”
Schkoor said she can’t afford a new car nor the cost of fixing her current car and she joked, “I’m just stuck unless I hit the lottery.”
When it comes to the insurance rates of Detroiters compared to their suburban counterparts, Schkoor said, “We really don’t have any alternative anymore and that is why we are so depressed, and emotionally challenged because of the stress we live under. They don’t make life nice for us. This is my reality. Most of us live on the poverty line.”
The lack of affordable insurance rates in the city, she said, is “forcing people to drive uninsured and it’s causing a lot of hit and run accidents because these drivers know they have no insurance, therefore they run away from the accident scene.”
The result, she noted, “is extra police work trying to run after these hit and run drivers. So it’s a vicious cycle.”
The Insurance Institute of Michigan, the powerful lobbying group in Lansing, claimed that redlining doesn’t exit in Detroit in a letter to the editor sent to the Michigan Chronicle.
“When ‘redlining’ is used to mean discrimination based on race, this is illegal and is condemned by the insurance industry. However, many times the term ‘redlining’ is used incorrectly to describe the differences in price and availability of insurance based on real risk,” said Pete Kuhnmuench, executive director of the Insurance Institute of Michigan.
“The Insurance Institute of Michigan has worked for years to reform the state’s one-size-fits-all no-fault auto insurance law to lower the price for everyone in the state. Detroiters would benefit from lower auto insurance premiums. That is a fact.”
But Schkoor took Kuhnmuench’s explanation with a grain of salt.
“They have their reasons. They get their lawyers together and make reasons appear legitimate. But I’m caught up in a web. If the mayor has the power to do it he ought to do it. That’s the bottom line,” Schkoor said. “If he doesn’t have the power he doesn’t need to be patronizing us.”
Mayor Duggan in his first State of the City Address called for insurance reform and proposed to create a D-Insurance to lower the exorbitant rates that Detroiters are paying for auto insurance.
“It is not justified. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect driving record and never been in an accident. Most Detroiters are paying more a month for car insurance than the car payment itself,” Duggan said in his address.
Bankole Thompson is the editor of the Michigan Chronicle. Email bthompson@michronicle.com.
