So Ben Roethlisberger, star Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and Super Bowl champion—riding a motorcycle without a helmet—goes one on one with an automobile whose driver fails to yield the right of way. As we learned in the aftermath, it wasn’t a good matchup.
The fact that Roethlisberger wasn’t helmeted brought on a spate of op-ed pieces and bloggings about personal rights and responsibilities—should the rest of us have to pay, indirectly, for medical care when someone’s injured because they didn’t wear a helmet? What about when they choose to drive without insurance?
Driving uninsured is far more common than you might think. Just ask Bruce Humphrey, CEO of RJF-PCG Private Client Group, Inc., an insurance provider in Plymouth. Of all his firm’s cases pending settlement, 70 percent involve customers who have been in an accident with an uninsured or underinsured motorist. “Your chances of getting into that situation are greater than getting into an accident where you are the one who’s liable,” Humphrey says. “In fact, almost 60 percent of all bodily injury–related accidents involve uninsured and underinsured motorists.”
Buying uninsured-/underinsured-motorist insurance covers you and your family in the event you’re in an accident with another driver who either does not carry automobile liability insurance or carries low limits of liability insurance. It’s particularly important to do if you have a high income or are the sole wage earner for your family; multiply that importance by 10 if you own a business.
Many states, including Minnesota, have laws requiring drivers to carry liability insurance. But even in these states, up to 14 percent of drivers do not carry insurance; in states without such laws, the ratio is as high as one in three drivers. So Minnesota also requires its drivers to buy uninsured-motorist coverage to protect themselves—a minimum of $30,000 per insured and $60,000 per accident. Those amounts are on the skimpy side, though.
“It’s amazing how quickly a person can run up $30,000 in medical bills,” Humphrey says. And while many people have disability insurance, which will cover lost wages, “disability coverage typically will pay just 66 percent or less of your normal income, and the payments can be subject to ordinary income taxes if the coverage was provided and paid for by your employer.”
››› The upshot is that thousands of drivers are underinsured when it comes to protecting themselves against other drivers who are underinsured. That’s surprising given that uninsured-motorist coverage is relatively inexpensive—about $100 per vehicle per year for coverage of $100,000 per person, $300,000 per accident. But even those levels of coverage are inadequate, Humphrey says, given all the expenses that can result from a car accident.
So how much uninsured-/underinsured-motorist coverage should you carry? Brace yourself: Humphrey recommends increasing your coverage to at least $1,000,000 per person, $1,000,000 per accident. Typically, he says, the most cost-effective way to increase that coverage is through what’s called an “excess liability/umbrella policy,” whose annual premium runs between $50 and $100 per car—depending, of course, on the carrier and the risk profile.
Just imagine the financial loss if the woman driving the car in the Roethlisberger accident hadn’t been insured. With standard coverage, he’d have just $30,000 to pay for his medical expenses—which included seven hours of surgery after the accident—and, potentially, lost wages. That’d cover about two afternoon’s worth of workouts for a guy like that.
