Insurance Laws Miss The Point

I read with interest a letter to the editor in today’s Erie Times News. The writer, Carol Hunt of Elgin, wrote of an unfair situation in which one uninsured driver caused a minor accident and was cited by the police for failure to have the required insurance while another, in a different accident which caused much greater injury, was not cited by the police. Ms. Hunt correctly observed the inherent inequity that can result from discretionary enforcement of the law and asked that the law be amended so as to remove the discretion of law enforcement personnel.

Ms. Hunt’s perspective is understandable and I applaud her willingness to take a stand about an issue that strikes her as unfair. But what concerned me was a back story in her letter that illustrates the fundamental flaw in perceiving insurance as something you buy only because the law requires it.

One of the drivers she describes was a teenager who recklessly injured two innocents. One of those parties was substantially injured and required medical treatment for which the injured party had no insurance. Because the reckless driver was uninsured, the innocent injured was left without a remedy.

This is the sort of “coverage tragedy” we see all the time in our practice. It’s one of the reasons we included a chapter on insurance in our free book, “The Ultimate Guide to Car Accidents in Pennsylvania: A Roadmap to Justice.” It’s one of the reasons we’re now considering a book devoted exclusively to the subject of buying insurance in Pennsylvania.

The truth about insurance is that the best reasons for buying it are the protection of you and yours. Complying with the law is a good thing, too, but the minimum insurance requirements the law provides are completely inadequate. Fortunately, buying reasonable level of coverage is very affordable, as we demonstrate with real life examples in our chapter on insurance coverage.