Poor driving records of Hispanics
Several weeks ago, someone brought up the question of the poor driving records
of Hispanics in this country. I have anecdotal evidence to
confirm it.
I'm an osteopathic physician and treat a lot of patients with musculo-skeletal conditions, especially injuries. Providence, Rhode Island is a magnet area for Latin American immigrants, especially Dominican, Haitian, Guatemalan and Peruvian. At least half of our patients in our office are from these countries. The capper is that they often have injures en masse such as five in a car. They do tend to travel this way which is certainly economical and energy efficient. Unfortunately, when they get into an accident, there are a lot of injuries.
After they do, why they just go to one of the many personal injury attorneys here who then send them to us and together, we all just work the system. It's legitimate and even, at least usually, valid but nevertheless winds up costing everyone in the form of higher auto insurance. I have little doubt though, that these patients have poor driving habits or maybe just little experience driving under American conditions. If they'd had a decent amount of American driving experience, most of these accidents would have been avoided.
At least they, though, are honest about the accidents. We also have a large
Nigerian community in Rhode Island many of whom were involved
accident scams. I'm not sure if they still are. The scenario went like this.
One of them would go and rent a car and pick up all of the insurance liability
options. Then five, six or seven of them would pile into the car and have an
accident.
They would claim that they were forced off the road into an abutment or a pole or some other stationary object by another car that left the scene. Of course, there were no witnesses and they all sustained neck and back injuries. About 20 years ago, I started seeing too many cases like that and finally began refusing to treat them.
In any kind of an investigation, the authorities always like to take down a
professional or two if they can. It's a nice feather for some ambitious cop
or prosecutor to have in his cap when he's up next for a promotion or rehiring.The
real bummer is that insurance companies can't use ethnicity to
rate clients. That's illegal because after all, it's discriminatory and we'd
never want to be accused of bigotry, now would we?. So just keep on paying those
premiums to subsidize the horrible driving records of these people so that I
and hundreds of thousands of other physicals, chiropractors, attorneys and clients
can exploit the system.
Ah, God bless America.
Roderick [ name withheld ]
August 2001