Amerikkalainen

Disclaimer that insurance laws vary by state, so I can't comment directly on OP's situation.

That being said, I have worked in insurance, and in the states where I have worked this is definitely not legal. Health insurance policies are typically purchased on an annual basis. You can pay for the policy in monthly installments, but the overall premium is an annual premium and it cannot just suddenly change in the middle of the policy term. The only time that a premium would change would be at renewal or if you had a "qualifying event" ie got married, divorced, had a kid, etc. When you buy insurance you sign a contract to pay X amount for one year of the insurance. If the insurance company randomly upped the premium in the middle of the policy term that would violate the contract. Therefore, it would be illegal.

The second thing that would be illegal about this is that you typically can't just immediately cancel a policy for non-payment. The insurance company has to notify you in writing that your policy will be cancelled and has to wait a certain amount of time after notifying you to cancel the policy. The amount of time the company has to wait before cancelling usually varies by state.

As I said, insurance laws vary by state, and OP's state could just have very lax insurance laws. However, if things really went down the way OP says they did, then what the insurance company did was likely very illegal. OP's family probably could have gotten a lawyer, challenged it, and won. It doesn't sound like his family had a lot of money though, so perhaps that wasn't an option.

Yeah, I really think there must have been a bit more to it. The only other thing I can think of is that, as someone else pointed out, this happened over 15 years ago, and perhaps at the time the laws were different? I was just a kid then, so I have absolutely no idea what the laws were like back then.

Do you have to do anything extra with your insurance? I would imagine most insurance carriers would consider it taxi use and could very well deny a claim on that basis if you didn't have cover for business use.

Wait we have replay for fair and foul now? When did that happen? Or is that one of the new ones for 2014?

Wouldn't it actually be better to keep using chalk? It seems like chalk is often a great indicator to the umpires whether a ball was fair or foul as chalk will fly up and a mark will be left when it hits the line. Wouldn't it be better to stick to chalk until baseball starts using instant replay for this sort of thing?