Go go idiots in Florida!

Today is the first day of October in the year of two thousand and seven and our illustrious Florida, State Government has allowed the no-fault insurance system that we have had here in Florida to sunset and adopted a new tort system.

What does this all mean?

Simply, what it means is that PIP, the minimal insurance you had to carry to operate a motor vehicle in the State of Florida, will be gone. The Insurance companies would have you believe that this will save motorist money and that this is a good thing for everyone. After all, why should you need insurance to cover your medical costs if your are not at fault, that’s the responsibility of the other guys insurance right? Sure, in a utopian society everyone is carrying insurance that will cover you if someone hits you. The reality, however, is very different and often times the person at fault either has no or insufficient insurance to cover your injury, lost wages etcetera.

What can you do?

Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do at this point, the no-fault system expired today and I am not totally sure when it will be able to be brought back, if it that is a possibility at all. What can and should do is protect yourself in case you are in an accident with a couple options that many insurance providers won’t tell you about or if they do, they down play the importance and sometimes even try and have you sign away your options.

The first one is called UM (uninsured/under-insured motorist) this basically protects you against being hit by an uninsured motorist or one who doesn’t have enough coverage to cover all of your costs/damages. This places the burden on your insurance provider to pick up the slack.

The other one is called stacked insurance and will only apply to you if you have more then one vehicle on the same insurance policy. This one is a little more complicated but is easily broken down into understandable terms. What a stacked policy does is stacks the amount of coverage by an amount multiplied by the number of vehicles on the policy. In other words if you have medical coverage of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000.00) and you have two (2) vehicles on your policy, if you have stacked your coverage, your medical coverage is actually two hundred thousand dollars ($200,000.00). This is the one that most insurance companies will try and hide from you and that requires you to sign or initial away, the common practice is to get you to deny it early on when you first get your policy set up and then they don’t offer it to you again and instead just ask if you want any changes made to your policy, most of the time people will just say no and that’s the end of it.

So in closing I will give a proud “bird” to our legislators and say, “Go home, nobody loves you.”