Accident & Injury Law in Texas

Posts Tagged ‘insurance’

We’ve all seen the Geico gecko and All State’s Dennis Haysbert on TV. They say we can save money on car insurance and maybe we can. It depends.
Prices are determined by factors such as your credit score, one of the top three factors in pricing, along with where you drive, how much you drive, your age and your gender. Your driving record is among the top ten factors calculated in the price but unless it’s terrible, it’s not as important as the others.

It pays to get five or six quotes. In some cases, you could save money buying over the Internet, but allow plenty of time to fill out a lengthy application with all sorts of questions. If you are an ultimate winner in the Web application process, you could save 15 percent over the price of buying from an agent, but not always.

Internet sellers include Geico Direct, Amica, Ameriprise, USAA and 21st Century.

In addition to your credit score, the price may also be influenced by your insurance score. Reed Elsevier sells the Choice Point Attract auto insurance score. It ranges from 200 to 997 and costs $12.95.

If you have been insured by a company for five years or more, you might get a better deal because of the loyalty discount. Having a home insured by the same company brings the multiline discount. Accident-free brings a nice discount as well.

If you have a teen driver, you will pay a high price, but could get discounts for driver training and good school grades.

Service is an important matter to consider. That is, if your agent is located a short distance away, you could get faster service for a car accident than you would from an Internet insurance provider who is a thousand miles away.

The City of Dallas has begun in earnest with the new policy of towing the vehicles of uninsured motorists. I hope the Austin Police copy this tactic and that word spreads quickly and greatly reduces the number of drivers who don’t carry the mandatory auto liability coverage. This would be a great benefit to our personal injury clients, and to motorists in general. On New Year’s Day Dallas police towed 20 vehicles.

I’ve written many times about the problems Texas has with uninsured motorists. More than 25% of Texas drivers have no auto insurance, even though it’s required by state law. This new policy of towing uninsured cars will disproportionately affect poor people, who find it harder to afford insurance. But the law is the law – even poor people are required to carry insurance, and poverty is not a good excuse to drive uninsured.

If you drive in Dallas and you either haven’t bought insurance or you have let your insurance lapse, you better take care of that soon or you could be facing very expensive costs to get your car out of the pound.

A criminal flees the police at speeds topping 100 mph, crosses into oncoming traffic and smashes into a car.  Sounds like a nightmare?  It gets worse.  His insurance company doesn’t want to pay up on his $300,000 auto insurance policy.

The Texas Supreme Court will soon decide who deserves the law’s protection – the family whose car was in the wrong place at the wrong time (the 1999 wreck left 7-year old Roney Tanner comatose for a week, in the hospital for a month and in physical therapy for five years) or an insurance company (Nationwide) with a reckless and irresponsible client.

Nationwide has taken the position that the fleeing driver (Richard Gibbons) violated his insurance contract by leading police on a wild chase all but guaranteed to end in a horrific wreck, relying on a starndard “intentional acts exclusion” clause to void coverage – and two courts have agreed with them so far.  Welcome to Texas where the insurance companies rarely pay for their insured’s mistakes.

Nationwide argues that Gibbons ought to have known that disregarding stop signs, traffic signals and lane markings during a protracted high-speed police chase would eventually lead to the type of accident that critically injured Roney Tanner.

But Don Cotton, the Tanners’ lawyer, said the accident was not inevitable. ,
The most dangerous parts of the chase were over by the time Gibbons hit the Tanners on lightly traveled roads surrounded by farmland, he said.

Significantly, Cotton said, pursuing police officers noted that Gibbons slammed on his brakes in an attempt to avoid hitting the Tanners’ 17-yearold Honda Accord with his Ford F-350.

“It is nonsensical to say that somebody intentionally caused harm when the only evidence in the record is that he was trying to avoid causing that harm,” Cotton told the nine justices. “The test is not reckless (acts). The test is ‘intentional.’ ”

If this isn’t a good reason not to carry Nationwide insurance than I don’t know what is.  It’s also all the more reason (as I always say) to carry high uninsured/under-insured coverage.

A Dallas-based company is offering Texans auto insurance by the mile.

MileMeter, which is targeting people who drive fewer than 12,000 miles a year, is the only company offering mileage-based insurance in Texas despite a law passed in 2001 that encourages such a plan.

MileMeter charges from 3 to 20 cents per mile, depending on coverage options chosen, and it takes the driver’s word on the odometer reading.  The policies are for six months, whether or not the driver has reached the mileage limit.

The company can offer low rates for low-mileage drivers because “it’s very difficult to get into an accident when your car is parked,” said MileMeter chief executive Chris Gay.  “The less you drive, the less risk you’re exposed to.”

Federal statistics put the average number of miles driven in 2006 at 14,768, but many Americans have driven less this year because of higher gas prices.  According to Gay, roughly half the population drives around 12,000 miles a year.

Progressive is planning to introduce a mileage-based plan in 2009 which uses GPS technology to track usage.

The problem, though, is that MileMeter’s limits top out at $50,000 per person and $100,00 per accident which is not nearly enough.  Also, the insurance automatically ends when the odometer has registered the number of miles purchased or six months have elapsed, whichever comes sooner.

To reduce the number of drivers without auto insurance, the state of Texas has launched a database that allows law enforcement officials to tell which drivers have insurance and which don’t.

The program, known as TexasSure, began in the Austin area on June 2, and is being tested for about 60 days before it is expected to go statewide.

Texas drivers are required by law to have auto insurance, but one in five is uninsured, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.

Drivers will still be required to carry proof of insurance, but the database was created to counter those who purchase an, insurance policy, get an insurance card and then cancel their policy.

The $7 million program is a joint effort among DPS, the Transportation Department, the Texas Department of Insurance and the insurance industry. It is being financed by vehicle registration fees. TexasSure requires all Texas insurance providers to supply a list of customers with up-to-date policies. The state then matches those policies to a driver’s license number, license plate number and vehicle identification number.

Under current law, drivers pulled over fora traffic violation who are found to be uninsured are ticketed $350 for the first offense, plus fees. Repeat offenders face fines of up to $1,000 and a two-year license suspension.

Yikes!  I’m not the only one.  Texas families saw their health insurance premiums soar 40 percent in five years – 10 times faster then their incomes increased, according to a report released today by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J., a national foundation that promotes health care improvement.

The foundations report, “Squeezed: How Costs for Insuring Families are Outpacing Income” was prepared by University of Minnesota researchers, did not study why premiums increase almost 30 percent nationally to an average of $10,728 in 2005.  In Texas, premiums jumped to an average $11,533.

Nationally, Texas ranked third behind Oklahoma and Idaho in premium increases from 2001 to 2005.  At the same time, Texas ranked No. 1 in the percentage of residents without insurance.  In 2005-2006 that figure was 27 percent and the state had 5.5 million of the nation’s 47 million uninsured people.

People without coverage often get expensive emergency room care, and those costs get passed on as higher premiums to people with insurance, says Regina Rogoff, the executive director of People’s Community Clinic which treats uninsured people in the Austin area.

Taxpayers also share the tab when hospitals and governments do more to help the uninsured according to Clarke Heidrick, a member of the Travis County Healthcare District Board.

I have some clients who recently fell into a hole in their GAP Policy. Here’s what happened:

They bought a new car in October, 2007 and purchased a GAP policy with it. The policy is, of course, designed to cover any gap between what they owe on the car and the replacement value of the car in case the car is in an accident. Since cars depreciate faster than you pay them off, GAP policies are useful when you are purchasing a new car with little or no money down (otherwise they can be a waste of money).

My clients car was destroyed in January of 2008 and there was a $4,000 gap. The policy holder (Stonebridge Casualty Insurance Company) refuses to pay for the gap coverage. The reason? My clients refinanced the car with their own bank in January.

The lesson: Shop for the best rates before you buy the car, and if you have already bought the car, check your GAP policy before you refinance.

Electronic Stability Control (ESC) selectively applies brakes to individual wheels to help keep the vehicle under control when swerving to avoid an accident or cornering on slippery pavement, and it can help a vehicle stay out of a situation that could lead to a rollover.

By model year 2012, the government will require automakers to include ESC on passenger vehicles. If all cars had ESC, some 10,000 lives a year could be saved, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Current equipped models are involved in 36 percent fewer fatal passenger-car crashes and 63 percent fewer fatal SUV, van, and pickup-truck crashes than vehicles without ESC, federal officials say. Unfortunately, stability control is available mainly on higher-priced vehicles; many small, inexpensive cars don’t offer it.

ESC is so important that Consumer Reports calls it the “single greatest advance in auto safety since the safety belt.” In fact, Consumer Reports, which has been rating cars since 1948, believes ESC is so critical to the safety of all drivers and passengers that they’ve revised their rating system to give it greater weight.

Anchorage, Alaska personal injury lawyer Michael Schneider has a great story about a client who lost a personal injury case because the client spoke to the insurance adjuster, trusted the adjuster, and apparently followed the adjuster’s bad advice, which ended up hurting the claim.

Mr. Schneider doesn’t have specifics but only says that at trial the client couldn’t explain to the jury why the client did and didn’t do certain things because to do so would violate a rule of evidence that prohibits the parties from mentioning that the defendant has insurance. (Just speculation, but he suspects the plaintiff wanted to tell the jury that the reason he didn’t immediately seek treatment is because the insurance adjuster told him he didn’t need to go see a doctor because the pain goes away after a few days, etc)

Sadly, this all could have been prevented if the personal injury plaintiff had spent a little time and done a little research about the process of making a personal injury claim.

In this day and age of the internet, plaintiffs have access to all types of resources that can help them protect their claim or even pursue their claim on their own. For example, we offer a free report “The Five Deadly Sins that can Wreck Your Car Accident Claim” which you can order without any obligation.

But I’m not alone. There are literally hundreds of websites offering free advice about all aspects of personal injury claims. If an injured person just takes a few minutes, they can learn a lot of information that will minimize the amount of damage that they do to their own claim.

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