Personal Injury: Why Insurance Companies Hold All the Cards

Phoenix Personal Injury Attorney: Why the insurance companies hold all the cards.

posted by: Phoenix Arizona Personal Injury Lawyers

Auto accident attorneys know that it is very easy to be for tort reform–until you have been injured in an accident. We know that insurance companies are making plenty of money. They can afford to pay out on the policies that good hard-working people purchase. I am very concerned that over the next few years we will see more and more of these laws come into affect.

If you were injured in a car wreck, you deserve to be able to recover what is fair. The idea that insurance companies can limit claims with the justification that premiums will increase is ridiculous. If you purchase an insurance policy for your vehicle, you should be able to submit a claim for the limits of the policy. In Arizona, the limits are already so low that it is unlikely that they will reduce them. But everyone knows that the 15,000/30,000 limits are totally inadequate to cover a typical car wreck. It seems as if the insurance companies will continue to win and the typical consumer will lose.

Originall posted online at:
http://www.wisconsinwatch.org/2011/08/14/auto-insurance-bill-was-clash-of-titans/

Companies, trial lawyers dominated insurance rollback
By Kate Golden
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

Last year, a driver in Milwaukee had a seizure, crossed the median and killed Samuel Milons Jr., 38. After Milons’ death, his fiancee, Angela Minerick, couldn’t afford the rent on their Milwaukee townhouse and racked up credit card debt.

But Minerick, a funeral director, is more secure knowing that their young son, Samuel III, will likely be able to afford college. Because of a 2009 auto insurance law that allowed Minerick to “stack” her two auto insurance policies and collect $75,000 — twice what it would have been without the law — Samuel has a trust to support him when he turns 18.

Beginning Nov. 1, however, cases like Samuel’s could have very different outcomes. That’s because one of the new Republican-controlled state Legislature’s first acts was to allow companies to forbid policy stacking.

On April 6, lawmakers repealed every aspect of 2009’s so-called “Truth in Auto” law except mandatory auto insurance. In addition to allowing anti-stacking language, the new law lowered auto insurance minimums to 1982 levels.

And it once again allowed insurance companies to insert “reducing clauses” into under-insured motorist policies that can dramatically reduce how much insurance companies must pay in accidents.

The 2009 changes required drivers to have $50,000 in coverage for the injury or death of a person, $100,000 for the injury or death of more than one person, and $15,000 for property damage. The new law will restore levels to the former minimum amounts: $25,000, $50,000 and $10,000.