Final Word on Drunk Driver Compensation

As we have discussed in parts one and two of this topic, thousands of Hoosiers are killed, paralyzed, suffer spinal cord injury, brain injury, amputation, and wrongful death in a car accident with a drunk driver. Traffic accidents with drunk drivers cost injured or killed Hoosiers and their families dearly not only in medical bills and lost income, but also in the loss of the injured or killed persons love, attention and affection.  How can Hoosiers protect themselves against a drunk driver with little or no insurance?  Imagine a parent is heading home from work.  This parent is the bread winner for the family of three, the other parent and two young children.  The working parent earns $80,000.00 dollars per year.  She is hit by a drunk driver.  Her injuries are so severe she is admitted to the hospital.  The hospital bills total over $300,000.00 dollars.  Her future medical bills will be $25,000.00 per year for the rest of her life.  She is only 30 years old, so she is expected to live another 50 or so years.  This makes her future medical bills about $1,250,000.00.  She will have lost wages of about $2,975,000.00.  The drunk driver has no insurance, what happens?

If the wage earner had planned ahead, she will be able to make a claim against her own insurance company under her “Uninsured motorist coverage”.  You may say, “That’s not right, why should she have to make a claim against her own insurance policy when it was the drunks fault?”  You would be right, of course, it’s not fair.  In a perfect world everyone would carry enough insurance to compensate people they hurt in a car crash.  We all know this is not a perfect world.  As such smart drivers protect themselves by buying uninsured motorist coverage.  The smart thing to do is to buy a policy in an amount of say $250,000.00.  Then you buy an “Umbrella policy.”  An umbrella policy will pay after the first policy is exhausted.  Umbrella policies are relatively less expensive than the underlying policy.  You should be able to purchase $1,000,000.00 for as little as $150.00 per year.  The increases for $1,000,000.00 and up are progressively less expensive.

I have been handling cases where the victim has been seriously injured for more than twenty years.  I’ve given seminars for more than ten years on the subject and am coauthor of what many consider to be the definitive book on Unisured Motorist Coverage in Indiana.  If you have been injured by someone else’s negligence, call me. Put my know-how to work for you and your family.