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And another thing.....

This business of people claiming ignorance even though the pertinent documents have been provided prior to them signing has got to stop.

When I was a young lawyer, a residential real estate transaction here in California would involve fewer than 100 pages at most, including the usual title report. Now, the loan documents alone run more than that, the standard form real estate contract runs 10 pages or more plus additional disclosure forms, every one of them because someone tried to back out of a deal, or enforce one because they didn't know what they were signing.

I've had to sign forms disclosing, or perhaps acknowledging, that my name was what it is, what I freely admit it is. It is truly absurd, but that's how most banks do business these days.

I concede that reading insurance policies is not as exciting as, say, watching American Idol, or Dancing with the Stars, or weeding up. It is not a matter of standardizing coverages either, because these people didn't have coverage for one driver. She should either have had coverage or not been driving.

Maybe the secret is to tie insurance coverage to Drivers licenses. When the policy that covers you lapses for whatever reason, your license turns blue. DPS or whoever issues licenses must get the green light from an admitted insurance carrier to issue a license, and if the coverage ends, so does the license. Maybe sends a twitter, or is it a tweet?, to the driver to pull over right then and there!

It's hard to imagine people being so ignorant of the world that they haven't figured out that, as The Old Rancher often taught, "the cheapest oats have already been run through the horse."

Insurance rates vary, of course, and insurance companies, naturally enough, prefer to insure the safest drivers for the highest rates they can, an impulse thwarted by competition. But a rate significantly below what others are charging for the same risk profile is suspect, unless you are confident you are in the preferred class of drivers, or a member of USAA, of course.

Insurance policies are not uniform, fungible, alike. A few companies still have agents but for the most part, competition has forced them to go to sales people, whose job it is to sell you on buying, as differentiated from the independent agent which is many respects was YOUR agent, not the company's.

If Texas requires drivers to carry liability insurance, and this driver did not, then the penalties ought to be imposed. They can sue their company, or agent, as the case may be for misrepresenting the coverages, if indeed that is what happened.