Ask an Attorney - What Insurance Coverage Should I Have? I Arthofer & Tonkin Law Offices
Hi, my name is Griff Tonkin. I'm a partner here at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices. Today is another video in our ‘Ask a Personal Injury Lawyer’ series.
We get asked by our clients, usually in rather unfortunate situations, what kind of insurance coverage for my automobile should I have had? You see, there are a number of drivers out there on the road who have no insurance at all or they have minimal insurance. At one point here in our home county, the statistic was one in six drivers had no insurance. I'm not sure if that's still an accurate statistic to this day, but I do know from our experience here at Arthofer and Tonkin that a number of drivers on the roadway don't have any insurance at all.
If you're involved in an accident with a driver like that, there's no resource usually for you to go after to recover for your injuries and damages against that driver. In that unfortunate situation, you have to turn to your own insurance and a coverage that's included in most policies, almost all policies here in California, called underinsured motorist coverage. The problem is if you have low limits, your underinsured motorist coverage is also low.
So even though you're turning to your own insurance company who you have faithfully paid premiums to, there may not be appropriate compensation for you. So this video is about what kind of insurance policy you should buy to make sure you're protected in the event that you're involved in an auto accident with someone with no insurance or with low policy limits. Currently in California, the state minimum policy limits for almost all drivers is $15,000.
There's a rare exception that we've only seen a few times over our over 50 years of combined experience where they can have only a $10,000 policy. If you go to the emergency room or if you take an ambulance ride or both, you're probably going to have medical bills that on their base exceed those $10,000 or $15,000 policy limits. That's just not very much money considering how expensive medical care is and just how expensive life is these days.
In that instance, it's going to be really important that you have appropriate underinsured motorist coverage or uninsured motorist coverage. Let me illustrate this with a case that we handled here at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices. We were involved with representing a lady who'd been struck on the freeway.
Now, she was struck by two different commercial vehicles. Fortunately, they had significant insurance policies. But in the course of our representation of this client, we learned that her own personal insurance had low limits.
We strongly suggested to her that she increase those policy limits. Typically speaking, an increase of your policy limits is relatively modest in terms of expenditure. It might only be $10, $15 a month to increase your policy limits from say $25,000 or $15,000 up to $50,000 or $100,000 or more.
In this instance, our client was wise. She listened to us and she increased her policy limits from $50,000 to $250,000. Well, this worked out for our client in a rather unfortunate way.
Just over a year after her first accident, she was involved in a second accident. The driver who rear-ended her caused severe cervical spine injury to our client. The driver who caused that rear-end accident only had a $15,000 policy.
Had our client not increased her policy limits, she would have had little more than that $15,000 to go after. But she did. She increased them to $250,000.
And while $250,000 may not have been full compensation for her injuries given how severe they were, it was much better compensation than the $15,000 she almost got stuck with. So when you're out there buying insurance, I understand. I'm a dad. I'm a husband. I have kids. I have teen drivers.
I know how expensive insurance is. Make sure that you save money on something else, something simple. Skip a trip to fast food, skip an expensive coffee, and increase your insurance policy limits to make sure you're protected when another driver causes an accident and injures you or your family.
How much insurance coverage you should have is a question we're happy to discuss with you. If you've been injured in a personal injury accident or someone else is at fault, call us at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices for a free consultation.
