Hi, I’m Roger Ghai, and I practice in Kennesaw, Georgia, involving car accidents as well as the effective drug cases. But today I wanted to talk to you about the types of insurance that would be available for your vehicle.
In Georgia, you can have what we call … of course liability, which everybody’s required to to co carry, which is $25,000 limits. And the other type of insurance that you is elective that you can have on your policy as either under insured motorist coverage or uninsured motorist coverage. Now, underinsured motorist coverage is a situation where you’ve been involved in a motor vehicle accident. The other party doesn’t have enough insurance to cover your injuries. And so if you’ve got a underinsured or uninsured for that matter policy, you can recover from your own insurance company. And typically what you’ll do, or they will do, I should say in this case, is your insurance company, if they have to pay out under the underinsured or uninsured coverage portion of your policy, they will then go ahead and recoup their money from the negligent driver. But there’s a little trick on this underinsured and uninsured motorist coverage, which is this, let’s say for example that you’ve got a liability policy of 25,000 or the defendant I should say has 25,000 of liability coverage, and your underinsured or uninsured motorist coverage is only $25,000 and it’s what we call non-stackable. Then what that means is even though you’ve got that $25,000 on your policy, it’s offset by the amount of the limits on the at fault party’s policy of 25,000. And, so, the total that you could ever recover is $25,000.
But let’s use another example of this very same example. Let’s say for example, again, the other party has $25,000 of coverage and then you have you UN coverage which is stackable, or add-on what we call in Georgia, and it’s 25,000, you couldn’t have more, you could 50, 100 thousand, you to a million dollars a lot of times. And then you can, even though the other party only has 25,000, that you had significant or catastrophic injuries, if you’ve got a large UN policy, then you can recover compensation for your pain and your suffering, your lost wages, medical expenses, all economic, non economic damages from your own insurance company. And then when they have to pay that money out, they will certainly go sue the other driver to recoup.
If you’ve been involved in a case where you don’t know whether there’s enough insurance to recover for your injuries, please my office at (770) 792-1000 and we can try to determine if there are any other policies that would be available to help you be fully compensated.