Suspending a driver’s license has always had one, key philosophy behind it: getting unsafe drivers off the road. And insurance companies have, for their entire existence, viewed a suspended license as a direct indicator of a driver’s safety habits.

But what happens when licenses are revoked for issues that have nothing to do with driving?

Currently, Ohio has a set of laws penalizing a slew of offences by revoking or suspending the guilty party’s driver’s license. For instance, defaulting on child-support payments can result in a suspended license.

However, to an insurance provider, the fact that the driver lost his license is seen as a red flag: unsafe, which calls for a higher premium.

The Dayton Daily reported that, of the 9.9 million license suspensions between 2006 and 2009, about 25 percent were for issues unrelated to driving. That’s 2,475,000 drivers who are paying higher car insurance premiums for years and years to come—for all we know, they could have had absolutely perfect driving records before the suspension.

Ohio law enforcers are starting to get wise to the trend, and they’re not happy.

“The intent of license suspensions was to get bad drivers off the road,” said Montgomery County Sheriff Phillip Plummer to the Dayton Daily. “But there are so many sanctions now, some of them counterproductive.”

The 2,475,000 drivers aside, an additional 3,861,000 drivers had their licenses suspended due to not having insurance. That state ascertains this information by sending out a letter when insurance policies expire, to which the driver in question must reply with proof of a new policy. If no reply is received within 90 days, the license goes the way of the Dodo.

In this scenario, a driver may have fallen behind financially. But insurance companies already punish those who allow their policies to lapse with higher premiums. Compounded with the added cost of a license suspension, those drivers may have to pay double what they were paying before allowing insurance to lapse, and that doesn’t include the hurdles of renewing a revoked license.

“You have people who are really dangerous drivers, who are a threat to us all by being on the road,” said state Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Kettering Republican, to the Dayton Daily. “And then you have those people who are caught up in this whole tangled web of license suspension, can’t afford to pay the fines, so they keep on driving, then they get another one because they get picked up for maybe running a stop sign. And these things mount and mount and mount.”

As of this writing, there is no plan by state legislators to revisit the license suspension policies this year.

—Theo Romeo