January 17, 2014
According to a meta study by WalletHub, California ranks as one of the top five states that pose financial risk to drivers.
The study essentially looked at the risk placed upon drivers by using the factors of uninsured drivers per capita in addition to the liability requirements of insured drivers.
Put more simply it’s asking the questions, if someone were to hit your car in a given state, what are the chances they would be insured? What are the chances that if they were insured, they’d have enough liability insurance to cover property and health damages?
It was with this in mind that California comes out not doing so well.
California requires only $15,000 minimum bodily injury coverage per person, $30,000 per accident and $5,000 in property damage per accident.
How do those numbers sound to you? Adequate? Well it turns out, they’re some of the lowest requirements in the country. By comparison, Maine (which ranked as least risky) requires $50,000, $100,000 and $25,000 respectively.
So what would happen if you were to be hit and the driver of the offending vehicle was either uninsured or didn’t have adequate insurance to cover damages? Well you’d better lawyer-up because chances are your insurance company and the other individual won’t pay-up without litigious grunt work.
This is a common foundation for a personal injury case, when that measly $15,000 per individual doesn’t quite cover the bill that some medical injuries rack up.
One note that should be made, is that there is no correlation between minimum liability requirements and the percentage of uninsured in a state. Some who oppose raising minimum requirements might argue that to do so would cause more people to go uninsured. This was found simply not to be the case.
It should also be noted that California was not the least insured state (some may have falsely jumped to that conclusion given the high incidence of undocumented immigrants in the state).
It was actually Oklahoma who received this title, with just over one in every four drivers in their state going uninsured.
John Rosenbaum is an Orange County workers compensation and personal injury attorney who has achieved a 99.8% success rate in over 30 years of experience as a Laguna Hills attorney.
If you’re in need of an extraordinary attorney in Orange County, give us a call for your free no obligation consultation.
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