Other Insurance Doesn’t Cover Medical Expenses

Answer:

Here in Texas, the state minimum limit for liability auto insurance in $30,000. It seems like a lot of money, but when you’ve been involved in a car accident, those medical bills can fly through the roof faster than you realize. For example, a trip in an ambulance to the emergency room can easily run $1,200, $1,500, $2,000. If you go to the emergency room to get the basic treatment to make sure that you don’t have any broken bones, you’re looking at another $5,000 to $10,000. Beyond that, you’re going to be sore and you might have to go see another doctor, so there will be more doctor bills. Many times medical bills exceed the amount of insurance that the at-fault driver has. That’s no fault of your own. You didn’t ask for this crash. You didn’t want this to happen, but now you’re stuck holding the bag. What do you do?

The good thing is that one of the pieces of insurance that you can purchase for yourself is called underinsured motorist coverage, or uninsured motorist coverage (UIM). There are two types of coverage. In the situation where the at-fault driver doesn’t have enough insurance to pay for all of your damages, like your medical bills, we’re going to look at your policy for the underinsured motorist coverage. That coverage provided by your insurance company is there to protect you, your family,  passengers, and your vehicle in a time of need. We hope that you never have to use it, but if you have it, it’s like a security blanket. You’re protecting your family from somebody else’s negligence. People aren’t worried about other people. People are worried about themselves. When you have UIM coverage, you’re protecting yourself, your family, and your passengers.

I’ll tell you a funny story. Before I started doing this, my wife was in charge of our bills. She would handle our insurance. She had a conversation with the agent. The agent hooked her up with the best policy we could have. When I started doing this and learned about insurance, I looked at her policy. I was shocked that she had $250,000 of coverage for other people and only $30,000 of coverage for us. If we caused a crash, the other person was protected up to a quarter of a million dollars, but if somebody hit us and we got hurt and went to the hospital, we were only covered up to $30,000. What happened if we had to have surgery? Who paid for that? Then the reality hit that nobody wass going to pay for it. If you don’t protect yourself, you’re not protected.

When I learned that little fact about our own insurance policy, I changed it really quick to make sure that our family, our passengers, the people that I care about that are in my vehicle are covered. If something does happen, like a bad crash that requires surgery, we know that’s going to get covered. It’s like having additional life insurance. Here’s the thing. A lot of people think it costs a lot of money to have this coverage, but it’s really pennies on the dollar. For the amount of what you’re doing for your family compared to the cost, you can’t go wrong with getting underinsured motorist coverage or uninsured motorist coverage. It’s important. If we ever run into a situation where the client is worried about the other person’s insurance, we always want to look at their own policy to see how they’ve protected themselves.