Frequently Asked Questions
Insurance can be confusing, overwhelming, and just hard to understand. Below are some commonly asked questions to help you better understand insurance language and the coverages. Please feel free to contact us with any other questions you may have.
To give more detail currently in Ohio state minimum is in reference to liability insurance limits of $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident, along with $25,000 in property damage. This coverage does not include property damage, comprehensive, or collision coverage’s. Example – you are involved in an auto accident and you are found at fault. In this accident the driver has serious injuries and is life-flighted to the nearest hospital with a trauma center. The passenger suffers a concussion along with a few broken bones and is taken by ambulance to the local hospital. These injuries and medical bills will fall under your liability insurance. Let us start with the driver. Her life flight costs approximately $45,000 and let us assume that she is in intensive care for 4 days and transferred to a regular room for 6 days and is released and will make a full recovery. So for sake of argument/example let us assume that her 10 day hospital stay resulted in around $100,000 of bills between the hospital, doctors, and all treatment received. That is a total expense of $145,000 just for the driver. Her insurance company is now going to file a claim against you as the driver at fault. Here is where your ‘state minimum’ comes into play. Your $25,000 of per person coverage will pay out leaving a remaining balance of $120,000. Who pays that? You do. The insurance company can take you to court, win the case, and the judge will place a judgment that you are responsible for the $120,000 balance. (Remember we have not even addressed the passenger and her expenses yet). Now you are probably saying well I do not have $120,000 and they cannot get ‘blood out of a turnip’ as the saying goes. On one hand that is true – however they can now seize your home, car, and other assets you own to liquidate them to help offset that judgment. If there still is not enough assets to cover that $120,000 next will be to garnish your wages until the balance is covered. The passenger in this scenario – let us assume her injuries and medical bills including the ambulance transportation amount to $18,000. Being that it is under the $25,000 per person coverage no problem – your state minimum coverage will take care of that. How about the extra $7,000 then you may be asking. There is no extra $7,000 as it is a $25,000 per person with a max total of $50,000 per accident. So while the total comes to $43,000 between both parties the driver is capped at the $25,000.
In using the same scenario as mentioned above let us briefly refer to the property damage. Let us assume this accident strictly involved the other driver’s car, your car, however since we lost control in the process of the accident a guard rail was mangled. Only the other drivers car and the guard rail would fall under the property damage cover, with state minimum being $25,000. I am not sure the last time you went car shopping – but there are not many cars you can buy new under $20,000. This means that in most cases again you will have a deficit from what the insurance company will be paying out versus the actual property damage sustained.