You pay your car insurance on time like your other bills, and so you probably take for granted the idea that you will have coverage if you ever get into a crash. Unfortunately, your protections rely a lot more on whether the other person has insurance than your own policy.
Unless you have a special rider on your motor vehicle policy that extends coverage to you in the event of an uninsured or an underinsured driver, you can find yourself stuck with the bill after someone else causes a crash and then turns out to not have insurance on their vehicle.
You might assume that there aren’t that many people on the Kentucky roads driving around without insurance. The truth about how many people don’t carry consistent motor vehicle insurance may shock you.
You cross paths with dozens of uninsured drivers every day
According to data analysis by the Insurance Information Institute, Kentucky has a roughly average number of uninsured drivers on its roads. It ranks 26th out of 50 states, putting it right in the middle of the spectrum for the United States.
However, the percentage is still surprisingly high even for an average level of uninsured drivers. The data, in this case, indicates that likely as many as 11.5% of all drivers on Kentucky roads don’t have an active motor vehicle liability insurance policy.
That means that a little more than one out of every 10 drivers you cross paths with doesn’t have coverage that will protect you from medical bills and car repair costs if they cause a wreck with your vehicle. You probably cross paths with hundreds of vehicles every day, if not thousands. In other words, you have to drive past dozens of uninsured vehicles.
Personal injury lawsuits can protect you from uninsured drivers
When someone else doesn’t have a policy on their vehicle and crashes into you, that could leave you with a lot of expensive bills while you can’t work because of injuries. If there is any consolation to the fact that you are financially vulnerable to the bad decisions of other people, it is certainly that you can at least hold someone accountable for those decisions with a personal injury lawsuit.
Kentucky law permits those who suffer physical injuries or financial losses to file civil lawsuits requesting compensation from the person responsible for the collision.
A personal injury lawsuit can help you recoup the direct costs of the crash, as well as lost wages and other expenses. Sitting down with a personal injury attorney is a good first step if you’re worrying about how to make ends meet after a crash caused by an uninsured Kentucky driver.
