YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO BUY UM/UIM INSURANCE

by David McCarthy

If you value yourself as much as you value others (and why wouldn’t you?), the car insurance you buy will include UM/UIM coverage, and at limits equal to the limits of your liability coverage.

UM stands for “uninsured motorist” and UIM for “underinsured motorist.” In case you are in an accident, you will want as much insurance for your own injuries as for the injuries of people you hit. So buy UM/UIM coverage, and buy it at limits equal to the limits of your liability coverage.


Picture this:

You are rear-ended at a red light by an “at-fault” driver whose limits of liability insurance (say, $100,000.00) are not nearly enough to compensate you for your medical expense, your lost income, your pain and suffering, and all the rest of it. Can you go against your own insurance company for the UIM coverage under your own policy? Yes, but only if the limits of your liability insurance exceed the limits of his liability insurance. If his liability limits equal or exceed yours, he is not “underinsured” in relation to you.

You would fare no better if you had greater limits of liability coverage (say, $250,000.00 per person/ $500,000.00 per occurrence) but only $100,000.00/ $300,000.00 of UM/UIM coverage (which is to say, that you provided more insurance for the people you hit than you provided for yourself). You not only want to buy UM/UIM coverage, you want to buy it at limits equal to the limits of your liability coverage.

UM/UIM insurance protects you in case you are hit by a driver who has no insurance, or by a hit-and-run driver, or by a driver whose liability limits are less than your liability limits. UM/UIM insurance helps fill the gap between the value of your injury and the amount of insurance available to pay for it.

Your relationship with your own insurance company will be adversarial because you will be looking to it to pay you for that part of your claim which exceeds the limits of liability insurance of the at-fault driver but does not exceed the limits of your UM/UIM coverage. (No matter what the value of your claim, your insurer will not pay out in excess of the limits of your coverage.)

It is easy to foul up a UM/UIM claim.

A mis-timed “okay” is all it takes. We recently got a call from a man who believed he had an open-and-shut UIM case and who was annoyed that his insurer had not already cut him a check. To us it was at least as likely that he had outsmarted himself, but he did not stay on the telephone long enough to tell for sure. He had already received a “policy limits” offer from the insurer of the “at-fault” driver and he had already told the adjuster for his own insurer to “open a file” for his UIM claim. He acknowledged he had reached a point at which some professional advice would be of help to him. Alas, he may have taken one step too many, but there is no way to tell, for at that point, something that meant more to him than his UIM claim came up, he ended the call, and nothing further has been heard from him.

We assumed that he had already prejudiced the right of his own insurer to pursue the at-fault driver, and so his UIM claim was DOA.

But beyond that, he was indulging some rosy assumptions that his insurer was likely to challenge. For one thing, he took his best-case outcome for granted, and he carped that he did not have a check in hand already. His best-case was a payment of $145,000.00 under the UIM clause of his auto policy, that is, the limits of his UIM coverage ($250,000.00) reduced by payments from the insurer of the “at-fault” driver ($100,000.00) and from the “med pay” clause of his own policy ($5,000.00). His actual medical expense to that point was rather modest. The evaluation of the case was predicated on “wage loss” and on “future medical expense.”

As for “wage loss” we would love to know how he planned to reconcile the fact that he was working full, eight-hour shifts with his assertion that he was receiving only half pay. His insurer is apt to want a plausible explanation for that.

Additionally, there was a conflict between his complaints that his insurer had not yet offered him the full $145,000.00 and his assertion that surgery was inevitable (and lots of physical therapy thereafter) but that he would not have this surgery for at least four months. (It is not the practice of liability insurance companies to throw gobs of money at you while you are still being treated for your injuries and before you have reached the point of “maximum medical improvement.”)

Then there is the question of comparative fault, that is, the extent to which the caller’s own negligence caused his injuries.

It does not follow from the fact that the other insurer made a “policy limits” offer that the caller’s own insurer will proceed as if the caller were free of fault. On the contrary, and because they are spending their own money, they will investigate whether, and to what extent, their insured was responsible for his own injuries. And even were they to conclude that he was utterly blameless, they might formulate a settlement offer that factors in some comparative fault.

Our caller professed dismay that his insurance company had not yet written him a check for the full $145,000.00. We allow for the possibility that he will not receive a dime on his UIM claim because he blundered at a critical moment in dealing with the representatives of both insurers.