Must-have Insurance Coverage For Georgia Drivers

Hi. I’m Roger Ghai and I wanted to talk this afternoon a little bit about what type of insurance coverage you should purchase for your motor vehicle — any vehicles in the house. Number one: you want to make sure that you’ve got what we call uninsured motorist insurance. How that comes into play is the following scenario.
Let’s say you’ve been involved in the car wreck, the other driver’s clearly at fault. It turns out that it’s either hit and run and you can’t track down the other driver, but you’ve sustained some injuries, maybe substantial injuries. Number two: they have insurance, but they have a very small policy of insurance. Typical example would be in Georgia, the normal liability limit minimum is $25,000.
You might have sustained a very severe injury, maybe a rotator cuff injury, a broken bone or something of worse magnitude. Maybe your medical bills alone are $25,000 or $30,000. Well, that’s not enough to compensate you for your pain and your suffering, your medical expenses, any possible lost wages or even, for that matter, any permanent compensation for a permanent injury.
If you have uninsured motorist and somebody has hit and run your vehicle and you haven’t been able to track them down, as long as you’ve got the police report, you made the claim to the police department. You can document that, then you can present the claim to your own insurance company for your injuries.
The second issue comes into play where if the other driver — you’re able to locate them, they just don’t have any insurance, well then you get to do this. You get to file the claim against your own insurance company. Which most people don’t want to do, but they can’t raise your rates because you never caused the accident in the first place. I get clients all the time telling me, “Well, I don’t want to make the claim to my insurance company because it’s going to raise my rates.” No, it won’t.
It’s only for bad driving that the rates can actually be raised. You’ll want to present the claim that you have for your pain and your suffering, your lost wages, your medical expenses through your own insurance company. The beautiful part about that is this, your insurance company then is not out on a limb.
They are not necessarily out all that money because what they’re going to do, they’re paying you X number of dollars for your injuries, your medical expenses, and so forth on your claim. What your insurance company is going to do is they’re actually going to file a lawsuit against the person that caused this accident — the person doesn’t have any insurance, and they’re going to get a judgment against that person.
They’re also going to be able to get that person’s driver’s license suspended in the State of Georgia until that money is paid to the insurance company. The only exception — of course, is that the person can file a bankruptcy and then they’re off the hook in that situation.
If you have any questions about whether you should actually have uninsured motorist — In fact, you should always have — now that I think about it, medical payment coverage because that always works out to your benefit a lot. It’s a very minimum premium per month that you have to pay for that and it’s extra protection for you.
Again, it’s a situation where you might have purchased — maybe for as little as $5 or $10 a month, what we call medical payment coverage on your motor vehicle so that you and your passengers are covered in the event of an accident and you need medical treatment. If you have any questions about types of coverages, how much I should purchase on my motor vehicle, all those types of issues, you can call my office at 770-792-1000 and I’ll try to help you out.