Fairfield Personal Injury Attorneys: Types of Insurance
Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Ben Scott from the Barnett and Bennett, law firm, and today I want to talk to you about picking the best auto insurance that you can. Now, in our line of work, we see lots of people who come in who are seriously hurt because somebody didn’t follow the safety rules when they’re driving. There are a lot of unsafe drivers out there, and we want to make sure that we keep ourselves and our families safe. Now, we had one person who came in had horrific injuries in this accident. It was a high-speed accident. He was off work for over a year, had hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills and some permanent injuries that he wasn’t going to get better from, but the other driver only had an insurance policy that would pay $15,000 and that’s all that’s required under California law. The minimum required insurance is what’s called a 15:30 policy. That means that the other driver’s insurance will only pay $15,000 per person for the personal injuries that they that someone suffers. And, you can as you can imagine that’s not even close to enouh for some of those injuries that you might get in an accident. So, that’s why it’s important to make sure that we have the coverage that we need. Now a lot of people think they have adequate insurance because the insurance agent told them or somebody told them that they have full coverage. Now there really is no such thing as full coverage. There are lots of different terms and lots of different things about insurance that you want to know. I’m not going to cover everything in this short video, but hopefully I can give you an idea of some of the most important things that you need. Now, the first type of insurance that you that you have to have is what’s called liability insurance. This only covers somebody else so if you caused an accident and you harm somebody. This is what that insurance pays for. It doesn’t pay for you, it doesn’t pay for your car and California law says that you have to have $15,000 of liability insurance per person and also what’s called a $30,000 aggregate coverage. This means that it will pay $30,000 per accident if there’s more than one person who is hurt in the accident, and it also requires that you have $5,000 in property coverage so it will pay up to five thousand dollars to fix somebody else’s car. Now, as you can imagine this is not nearly enough for most accidents. Sometimes you just put a little scratch on a car and it’s going to cost $5,000 to fix that little scratch. So, you want to make sure that you are protected because what happens if you don’t have enough insurance and you hurt somebody? Guess what, that person that you hurt can go after your personal assets and your insurance is not going to cover everything so you want to make sure that you have a substantial amount of insurance. Talk to your agent and make sure you get as much as you can afford.
The next type of insurance that you’ll want to have is what’s called collision insurance. What this pays for is this pays for your vehicle. So, if you cause an accident this will pay to fix your vehicle, and usually you’re gonna have a deductible on this. I would recommend getting a high deductible, because that usually means your rates are gonna be quite a bit lower and so you want to get that collision coverage. And that a lot of times that makes it a lot. Even if somebody else causes the accident, your insurance will work with you on getting your car repaired as well, and so it’s very helpful to have that collision insurance. You also want to get what’s called comprehensive insurance. This covers damage to your car from other things, maybe not an accident, maybe it’s sand damage or maybe a tree blows down and falls on your car. So these are these are other things any other type of damage this will pay for that as well, so that’s important. Now one of the most important things that you can get is what’s called uninsured motorist coverage. Now this is for when another driver causes an accident and you get hurt. This uninsured motorist coverage will help pay for your injuries. Now it’s also called underinsured motorist coverage. So, if you go back to that example of that driver that got hurt by another driver with only $15,000 in insurance, that’s what we would call an underinsured situation. That $15,000 was not enough, but if if this driver who was hurt had an uninsured motorist policy, this uninsured motorist policy would have made up the difference up to the up to the policy limits. So you want to get as much uninsured motorist coverage as you can, because there are a lot of drivers out there who only have a small amount of insurance and there’s a lot of drivers who have no insurance at all and this makes sure that you can get paid for your medical bills, it makes sure that you can get paid for any lost income because you’re not able to work, it’ll also make sure you get paid for any of the pain and suffering inconvenience you have to go through. Now hopefully this insurance is something that you don’t need. Hopefully, you’re a safe driver and you’re able to avoid all the other dangerous drivers out there, but you want to make sure that you protect yourself and protect your family. And, the final type of insurance I want to talk about what’s called mid pay or medical payments insurance. This is a good insurance to have. What this does is it’s a policy that will pay for any medical bills that you get from any accident whether it’s your fault or somebody else’s fault. Anytime you’re in a car accident your insurance will pay medical bills up to a certain amount, and so those are I think some of the most important types of insurance you want to have. Make sure that you are well protected. Make sure you have as much insurance as you can afford because you want to make sure that you, your family and other people are protected in case they get in an accident.