Personal Injuries and Insurance Coverage

Sustaining a personal injury in an accident is hard enough without having to worry about if there will be money availible to pay for medical expenses and lost wages.  You should be focused on recovering from your injuries and not having to worry about how the mounting medical bills will be paid.

There is nothing more frustrating for a client that relaizing that the person responsible for thier injuries has only the minimum amount of insurance coverage and their own uninsured/underinsured motorist (UM/UIM) coverage is not enough to cover the bills.  For clients invovled in a motorcycle accident this can be devistating. 

We sugest that you review your own insurance poilices to ensure that you have UM/UIM police limits would be enough to cover a major accident.  Under North Carolina law your UM/UIM policy does not come inot play until or unless the responsible party’s insurance is in adequate.  One fact that most people don’t understand is that your UM/UIM carries gets a credit against their policy limits for the amount of insurance the responsible party has.  WHat that means is if you have $100,000.00 in UM/UIM coverage and the responsible party has a $50,000.00 policy, there is only a maximum of $100,000.00 in coverage. $50,000.00 from the responsible party and $50,000.00 from your UM/UIM coverage.  Typical medical expenses in a motorcycle accident can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Another area of insurance coverage that can be confusing is the difference between multiple insurance policies and a single policy that covers multiple vehicles.  Under North Carolina law if there are multiple policies (i.e. a car on one policy and a motorcycle on another)  these policies can be stacked.  Staking means that you can use each policy for covering the accident.  An issue we run into is a client has one policy with all of their vehicles covered in it.  Under this type of policy you cannot stack the limits for each vehicle.   If you have any questions about UM/UIM coverage,would like us to help review yours insurance coverage or have been injured in an accident please give us a call.