05:28 PM EST on Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Associated Press

CHARLESTON, S.C. — More than six years after backers of auto insurance reform pledged to phase out recoupment fees, about one in 10 South Carolina drivers still are paying into a fund from which the state's worst drivers get coverage.

An overhaul of the state's auto insurance laws in March 1999 was supposed to get rid of the fee for most people by 2002. Motorists with points stemming from moving violations on their driving record as of March 1999 would have paid the fee through the end of this year.

Dean Kruger, the insurance department's chief actuary, was the primary author behind the 1999 reform legislation and at the time said the 2005 target to payoff the fund was "workable."

"Quite frankly I just missed it," he said this week. Kruger said the entire debt could have been erased if all drivers had been required to pay into the fund through the middle of 2002, instead of March of that year.

Close to $320 million has been collected from the fee so far.

That money has been used to pay claims and debt owed by the South Carolina Reinsurance Facility, a state-run fund set up in the early 1970s to cover problem drivers no company wanted to insure.

For decades, the fund repeatedly posted annual net losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars because its premiums couldn't cover all the claims it paid.

The fund, like the fee, was supposed to end this year. But the fund still has $53 million in liabilities, most of it debt owed to insurers who had to cover the fund's shortfalls. At the current pace of fee collections, only about $12 million is making its way into the fund each year, meaning it will be at least another four years before all of the fund's obligations are met.

Legislation being drafted by the Insurance Department would extend the life of the fund until 2010. The bill, which has yet to be filed by state lawmakers, would also look to insurance companies to pay the rest of what's owed.

If that proves acceptable, it's likely that insurers will pass the extra costs to policyholders in the form of a rate hike.

State Rep. Harry Cato, R-Greenville, said that any rate hike that may result now should be marginal.

"We're talking about 1 percent over four to five years. We can live with that," said Cato, who is chairman of the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee.