Laws on Personal Injury Cases Have Changed

Citizens of North Carolina have lost valuable rights starting October 1, 2011. The worst part of these recent changes is that the public won't know about the harm until enough people get worked over by the new system and that may take years of injustice after injustice until the word finally gets out that the new system is not fair to the responsible consumer.

If you have purchased health insurance or medical payments coverage on your automobile policy, then you are paying premiums for benefits that the person who causes the harm gets to use. For example, if a drunk driver causes a bad collision and you end up in the hospital for months like one of my clients, your health insurance and your medical payments coverage is used to benefit the drunk driver. Even though you were responsible and purchased the insurance for you and your family, with money from your paycheck, the drunk driver's insurance company is only responsible for the unpaid amount of the bills.

How do you think this affects the negotiations between insurance adjuster and attorney over fair compensation for your injuries? Instead of having to pay the entire policy limit for a serious injury, the auto insurance company may get away with paying only a limited part of the policy limit because the bills have been paid by health insurance or through a client's med pay coverage. So your health insurance becomes the primary payer for bills that ought to be the responsibility of the drink driver's auto policy.

Can you imagine how much less auto insurance companies will pay out over a year to injured parties across the state of North Carolina? Do you think you will see a reduction in your auto insurance rates to reflect the certainty that less money will be paid out to injured people? Absolutely not. North Carolina consumers will continue to get scammed out of higher auto insurance premiums for less coverage. We are now in a system where the irresponsible among us, those who choose not to have health insurance and to have no medical payments coverage on their auto policy, will make a better recovery for their injuries caused by the drunk driver's actions than will the responsible citizens of North Carolina.

I can tell you from many years of experience as a trial attorney and advocate for the injured, that the insurance companies will use this new system to make even worse offers than are being currently made and which will leave the injured person with less than adequate recovery. Unfortunately, until word gets out from one undercompensated family to another and until enough North Carolinians are shafted by insurance companies, we will be stuck with this system. At some point, enough people will be harmed and sensibility will return to Raleigh and to our state legislators. Until then, it will be even more important than it has ever been to have an experiencedGreenville personal injury lawyer like Timothy E. Burch and Burch Law Office in Greenville, North Carolina on your side to document your claim and maximize the recovery available to you as the injured person. Contact us today!