Minimum Coverage Puts You and Your Family at Risk.
What’s Wrong with Minimum Coverage?
You get rear ended while waiting at a stop light. Your neck flies back into the headrest, and then you are slammed forward and hit your head on the wheel.
You may have a concussion, so the ambulance that arrives takes you to the hospital after the EMT’s check you out. While there, you get a CT scan, and you are instructed to follow up with a neurologist to make sure you don’t have a head injury.
Your neck and back also hurt, and it’s painful to even sit or walk at work. You’ve been referred to physical therapy, which might go one for weeks or months, during which time you will lose thousands in pay from your missed work.
You feel that you deserve compensation for your medical bills, your lost wages, your pain and suffering, and the inconvenience of it all.
You File a Claim with the Other Driver’s Insurance Company.
The insurance company takes your claim, and a few days later, the adjuster calls and offers you $5000 for your injuries.
Sounds great, right?
Wait a minute. You know ambulance rides are expensive. Hospital visits are very expensive. You’re going to need weeks or months of physical therapy, and you don’t know if that is going to solve the problem.
On top of that, you haven’t even had a chance to follow up with the neurologist that the hospital recommended, and you don’t know if you’re going to need treatment for that either.
The adjuster says that $5000 is the best they can do, you’re not really injured, and you’ll probably feel better in a week or two.
You Decide to Get a Lawyer.
You make the decision to get a personal injury attorney. After evaluating your case, they advise you that your claim is almost certainly worth far more than $5000 and that you need to complete your healing before they continue negotiations with the insurance company.
At your neurology appointment, you find out that your continued headaches and dizziness are the result of a concussion that you sustained, and need to undergo rehabilitation.
The orthopedic surgeon that your physical therapist works with orders imaging and diagnoses you with cervical sprain, thoracic sprain, and lumbar sprain.
You undergo months of physical therapy, multiple steroid injections, and follow up CT scans.
After six months of this, you are finally starting to return to your condition before the crash.
How Much is Your Case Worth?
You’ve accumulated $30,000 in medical bills.
You’ve missed about a month of work and thousands in pay.
You’ve endured months of pain.
You’ve missed out on basic joys of life like going outside and playing with your kids.
Your lawyer tells you that they have seen Maryland juries award
between $70,000 and $90,000 in cases like yours.
But Wait. The Other Driver Has A State Minimum Policy.
Your lawyer discovers that the other driver bought the cheapest insurance that they could find and ended up with a state minimum coverage policy.
In Maryland, drivers are only required to have $30,000 in liability coverage per person injured.
This is starting to sound bad for you.
It is.
How Much is Your Case Worth Now?
Probably Zero.
Why? Because you had a state minimum policy too.
After your medical bills are paid, there will be likely nothing left for you.
You Can Protect Yourself and Your Family.
Across Maryland, this situation plays out over and over again. You can protect yourself and your family. How?
Buy an Appropriate Amount of Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist Coverage.
UI/UIM coverage kicks in when you are injured by another driver who either does not have insurance at all, or does not have enough insurance to cover the full value of your claim.
Many insurance experts recommend getting a $100,000/300,000 policy, for both liability coverage and UI/UIM coverage.
Protecting Yourself Is Probably Less Expensive Than You Think.
It’s no secret that car insurance can be expensive.
What most people don’t know is that once you are already paying for coverage, getting more coverage is surprisingly affordable.
As crazy as it sounds, one company’s minimum UI/UIM coverage (30k/60k) was actually more expensive than a 100k/300k policy!
Minimum Coverage is Sometimes More Expensive!
I recently got a bunch of real car insurance quotes for myself. For each company, I got a quote for minimum coverage, 100k/300k coverage, and the maximum amount that company would offer.
For each quote, the amount of liability coverage matches the amount of UI/UIM coverage. So if you see a quote listed below for 100k/300k, that means the policy includes 100/300 for liability and 100/300 for UI/UIM.
The data is below.
The Data
Monthly cost of liability and UI/UIM coverage for given coverage limits.
The more coverage you get, the cheaper each dollar of coverage becomes.
The table below takes each of the above quotes and shows how much
you are paying per $1000 of coverage that you have. As you can see, the
cost you are paying for each $1000 of coverage falls dramatically the
more coverage you get:
Monthly cost per $1000 of liability and UI/UIM coverage for given coverage limits.
A quote from Esurance for a 100/300k policy.
It’s Time to Take Action.
You’ve seen that increasing your coverage drastically reduces the price you pay per $1000 of coverage.
Don’t keep a 30k Maryland minimum policy when for just a few dollars more per month, you can more than TRIPLE your coverage.
Protect your yourself and your family and update your insurance coverage.
The information provided on this website does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only. You should contact an attorney to obtain advice that applies to your specific case.