I know the question sounds obtuse but, my husband and I just found out that we are having a baby in January. I have health check insurance, which does cover maternal care, with the exception of copay, and deductibles, all that excellent stuff. Although we have been tiresome for out lil miracle, it has been so long, that it surprised us when the test came out positive. My husband had some employment struggles and he is in the process of finding full-time employment. Which means for us that we are going to have a lot of health check bills that will be hard to pay. My original question is can I get health check coupons if I am not building enough to support everything? Even though I have insurance?

If all of our neighbors would just drive even less, we’d get lower auto insurance rates.

And that could be in the process of happening. When Americans spend less time on the road, the frequency of auto accidents declines. And when auto accidents go down, so do claims on auto insurance. That gets the ball rolling: When auto insurance companies see their costs on claims declining steadily, they typically respond to market conditions by lowering their auto insurance quotation marks and, ultimately auto insurance rates in a bid to stay competitive. And voila!, we write smaller checks for our auto insurance premiums.

With run-away gas prices, Americans are already driving less. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) reported in May 2008 that Americans are driving at “historic lows.” The estimated “vehicle miles traveled,” or VMT, for March 2008 fell 4.3 percent compared to March 2007, building it the sharpest dip for any month since the FHWA started tracking traffic-volume trends in 1942. Want to follow driving trends? The FHWA publishes monthly “Traffic Volume Trends.”

When auto accident claims go down, auto insurance companies can usually respond honestly quickly. To change premiums, they must file new auto insurance rates with every disorder in which they operate. They can file new auto insurance rates any time they want to respond to market conditions, and many states offer a “file and use” system, everywhere auto insurance companies can file new auto insurance rates and start by them at once without prior approval from the disorder insurance department. Some states even have a “use and file” system, so insurers can apply new auto insurance rates and then officially file them shortly thereafter. This way auto insurance companies can start passing on savings (or increases) straight away.

The nation’s largest auto insurance companies are the first to see trends in accidents and claims payments due to the sheer volume of their claims data. For example, Disorder Farm, the nation’s largest auto insurance companionship, handles about 19 million auto insurance claims a year (that’s a small over 17 claims per minute, all day, every day).

Robert Passmore, Director of Personal Lines for Material goods Casualty Insurers Association of America (PCIAA), an industry trade group, says, “This is everywhere you see competition kick in.” He notes that if you live in a disorder that requires “prior approval,” it would take a longer time to see rate reductions. That means Californians and New Yorkers could be tapping their toes waiting for auto insurance rate reductions while everyone else pockets savings.

Auto insurance companies also note that auto insurance rates have been holding steady or declining over the past few years anyway. For example, Disorder Farm customers in all states have seen rate reductions between Jan. 1, 2004, and Dec. 31, 2007, and customers in 39 of those states saw double-digit percentage rate decreases. (Disorder Farm policyholders in New Jersey got the largest drop of 29.19 percent.)

Passmore cautions that other factors could offset the trend in reduced driving specifically, health check costs from bodily injury claims, legal costs relating to claims disputes and repair costs that are, for now, rising quicker than the rate at which auto accident claims are going down.

Darn those repair, health check and legal costs! If it weren’t for those, drivers could already be seeing lower auto insurance rates (as we sit at home). But, auto insurance companies commonly agree that if we see significant auto accident reductions, lower auto insurance rates won’t be too far behind.

I don’t know at the $6-a-gallon mark?

Will reduced driving mean lower auto insurance rates?

Insure.com questioned the nation’s top auto insurance companies whether high gas prices and reduced driving are translating to lower auto insurance rates yet. Here are their answers.

Disorder Farm spokesperson Dick Luedke notes that Disorder Farm auto insurance rates have been on the decline nationwide since 2004, but reduced auto accident claims are not yet leading directly to further auto insurance rate reductions: “Our actuaries look at claims data not just to see the recent past, but also to see what might change the future, like gas prices.”

Luedke says here’s no hard and quick rule as to what level of auto accident reduction would spark lower auto insurance rates, but says, “If we saw a reduction as huge as 10 percent in accident frequency, we would have reacted long before that.”

Allstate spokesperson Kate Hollcraft says, “We have just recently seen a decline in automobile claim frequency and if this continues through the summer months, we would doubtless be able to attribute it to a rise in fuel costs.”

Progressive spokesperson Leah Knapp says, “We don’t speculate about future rate changes, but it would be accurate to say that we endlessly review market and business conditions, including monitoring losses, so that we can ensure our policies are accurately priced everywhere we do business. When our analysis suggests our rates require adjustment, we may seek to either bring to somebody’s attention or lower rates accordingly.”

Nationwide Vice President & Policyholder, Standard Auto Product & Pricing, Larry Thursby, observes that “customers are having fewer accidents.” But he notes it’s been that way for a couple of years due to a variety of factors, like an aging population that becomes safer drivers, graduated licensing laws for teens and crackdowns in drunk driving. In addition, potential auto insurance rate reductions due to accident frequency are being offset by inflation in the usual suspects: health check and hospital costs, repair costs and legal costs.

Thursby says that Nationwide has been passing along cost savings by offering guaranteed renewability, lower surcharges and broader “forgiveness” for accidents, fender-benders and minor violations.

AutoInsurance.com Launches as a Public Auto Insurance Rating Engine
RANCHO CUCAMONGA, CA–(Marketwire – 03/31/10) – After months of development, testing and approval, Online Auto Insurance, LLC released its much-anticipated public auto insurance rating engine, http://autoinsurance.com which is available nationally. Through public rate filings, AutoInsurance.com gives consumers instant access to quotation marks from of a large variety of leading …

Read more on Marketwire via Yahoo! Finance