Life After a Texas Motorcycle Wreck
If you ride, you know the risks. Imagine that you’re riding home on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Traffic is light, not a care in the world, you’re coasting down the road being responsible. Then, someone runs a stop sign. The next thing you know is that you’re waking up in the hospital and you learn your motorcycle is totaled. You have a number of surgeries lined up; you won’t be able to work for six months. Medical bills are about to start arriving, and then you get a call. The driver who hit you had no insurance… or maybe they did, but they carried the bare minimums. They bought the cheapest policy possible just to satisfy their legal requirements and those limits are nowhere near enough to cover your injuries or the damage to your bike.
This isn’t a freak occurrence. Every day in the Dallas, Texas area, drivers and motorcyclists are hit and seriously injured by people who ignore the law, or cheap out. The crash lasts seconds, the financial consequences last for years. The Car Crash Captain, here in Richardson, Texas, has the details on how you can potentially avoid this catastrophe.
The No Insurance Problem is Bigger than People Realize
Here in Texas, around 15% of drivers operate without any insurance at all. Another 40% operate with just the state minimum requirements ($25,000 property damage coverage, $30,000 injury coverage). That means roughly half of the drivers you pass on the road don’t carry enough insurance to ensure you’re not stuck with enormous bills.
Let’s go back to our opening scenario. Suppose you recently bought a brand-new Harley Davidson; sticker price of $40,000. If your motorcycle is totaled and their insurance company sends you a check for $25,000 – that’s the cap on how much they’ll pay out for property damage. You’re out $15,000 because another driver wasn’t paying attention.
Your medical bills and surgeries add up, and you’re hit with $120,000 in medical bills. Their insurance pays out $30,000, because that’s the cap on what they are obligated to pay. You’re out $90,000 if your personal medical insurance doesn’t cover anything.
You lose half a year’s wages because you can’t work; let’s say that’s $40,000 in income you couldn’t earn. Their insurance company doesn’t pay anything, because you’ve hit the cap on the bodily injury portion of the policy. You’re out another $40,000 because you couldn’t earn anything.
We haven’t even gotten into rehab, pain and suffering, long-term disabilities, or anything like that, and you’re already facing about $150,000 worth of expenses or lost earnings because another driver didn’t do the right thing.
Your Insurance Might be More Important Than Their Insurance
Fortunately, we do have other options that can help pick up the slack. Your own insurance policy should have a section called uninsured motorist coverage. If the at-fault driver’s insurance only pays $25,000 for your bike, yours might pick up the other $15,000 (we’ll talk about why it “might” in a minute). Your insurance should pick up some of the medical bills (your personal health insurance will hopefully cover most of it, especially if they have no insurance).
There are a bunch of insurance jargony parts to your policy that you will hope to never have to use. They include:
- Uninsured Motorist (UM)
- Underinsured Motorist (UIM)
- Medical Payments (MedPay)
- Personal Injury Protection (PIP)
And often when you’re purchasing a new insurance policy, you want to save some money. So, you might decline a lot of these so you can save a little bit on your premiums. It’s actually a reasonable response, because insurance rates just keep getting higher and higher. But if you’re riding a motorcycle, your risks of financial catastrophe are high (higher than those driving 4 wheeled vehicles). And while the other party should be doing the right thing, the truth is at last half of the population is not doing the right thing.
We can sue them, but if someone won’t even pay for insurance, the likelihood that they have any assets to collect upon is tiny. You’ll have a piece of paper that says you won the lawsuit, but paper is cheap.
How You can Protect Yourself
That means we have to make sure we protect ourselves. Your insurance “might” pick up some of the costs, but often UM doesn’t protect your property; just your body. Unless you’ve specifically confirmed that your insurance has an uninsured property damage (UIMP) part of it as well. These generally aren’t even offered when you’re purchasing the insurance, and it’s not automatically a part of the UM or UIM portions of the insurance.
To protect yourself, talk to your agent about:
Maxing out your UM/UIM protection. You will want at least $100,000 of bodily injury coverage ($250,000 is even better, if it’s offered) and at least $50,000 in UIMP coverage to pay you for the busted up bike.
Carrying comprehensive and collision coverage. Your comprehensive will kick in to help pay for the bike if you don’t have that UIMP. A gap insurance policy is essential if you owe more on the bike than it is now worth.
Increasing your PIP and MedPay. PIP will replace 80% of your wages if you can’t work (double check that percentage, all policies are different). MedPay will cover your hospital bills, and can cover your deductibles if your health insurance is also kicking in.
Using a disability policy. Motorcycle accidents often cause severe injuries that prevent riders from being able to work for weeks or months. A short-term disability policy will kick in after a week; a long-term disability policy will kick in after about 6 months.
Considering umbrella insurance. Umbrella policies can cover a lot; they’re designed to protect you no matter what happens – from bike wrecks, to burglaries, to liability on your property. Find one that at least will be an uninsured motorist umbrella.
The bottom line is that it’s never a good time to be involved in a life altering wreck. And while it shouldn’t fall on you if you’re the victim, the reality is that we can’t rely on others to do the right thing.
Talk to your insurance agent to figure out what your coverage is, and if you’re protected in a worst-case scenario. If you’ve already been hit, then you need to speak with a Texas motorcycle wreck lawyer; even if the other driver had no insurance.
Herbert Law Group Will Fight for You
No matter what coverage the other party has, or doesn’t have, you need a lawyer on your side to ensure you receive the maximum compensation possible.
Your injuries aren’t your fault. You shouldn’t have to be financially responsible for any of this. And that’s what we fight hard to ensure. We’ll deal with your insurance, their insurance, and figure out how to work the claim in the right way to ensure you’re well taken care of.
That all starts with getting to know you. We need to know what happened, and then we’ll figure out how to proceed. Call our offices at 214-414-3808, or fill out our contact form, and we’ll have a free conversation from our offices in the DFW area to get things started.