Enhanced Underinsured Motorist Coverage Now Available

Enhanced Underinsured Motorist Coverage

As my avid blog followers are already aware, I am a Baltimore Chiropractor with five Baltimore Chiropractic clinics. We offer chiropractic services in Baltimore City, Catonsville, Dundalk, and Glen Burnie. We routinely treat patients with headaches, neck pain, back pain, and arm and leg pain. We use drug-free conservative measures to rehab acute injuries. Many of our patients present to us with acute whiplash pain, from having been rear-ended in Baltimore automobile accidents. We also see a lot of patients who are injured while working and require acute rehabilitation to help get them back to work. And even “regular people” and “weekend warriors” with occasional aches and pains utilize our chiropractic care and rehab services to help with their pains in order to maintain their quality of life.

As a clinic that spends a lot of our time treating acute whiplash patients who suffer with headaches, neck pain, and back pain following Baltimore auto accidents, any time there is a new law that impacts this segment of the population it tends to pique my interest. As recently as July 1, 2018 the Maryland General Assembly enacted a new law meant to to deal with automobile insurance coverage. The law mandates that auto insurers now offer “enhanced underinsurance motorist coverage” or “EUIM” coverage.

Prior to the new law, if someone was injured as a result of the negligence of another driver, they would be entitled to recover monies up to the policy limits of the adverse driver in addition to any Underinsured Motorist Coverage that they carried on their own policy. This presumes that the injuries suffered were enough to warrant the full policy limits, which in many cases, they are not. However, the amount that the injured party collected from the adverse driver’s insurance company would be subtracted out from their UIM coverage.

By way of example: Lets say an injured party is struck by a driver who had a 30k limit policy. Unfortunately for our example they suffered 150k worth of damage/injury/lost wages/pain and suffering. This person could only collect maximimally 30k from the adverse insurance and 70k from their own UIM coverage. Both insurances would be “off the hook” with 100k in policy limits tendered. The injured patient would be “short 50k” and this would go uncompensated.

As a result of the law change, EUIM coverage, if purchased, now allows for policies to be stacked whereby you can now ADD or STACK the coverage amounts when recovering as an injured party. Using the same example, a patient with 150k worth of damage can now recover 30k from the injured party and the full 100k from their own EUIM policy, bringing their total compensation to 130k, a significant amount more than the 100k they were able to recover in the first example.

In short, the new EUIM policy laws allows for injured parties and/or their legal representatives to “stack” liability and EUIM claims in order to recover more. Having treated auto accident injury patients for years in Las Vegas, NV and Baltimore, MD I can attest that most patients don’t think about auto insurance policy limits until after they’ve been injured. In the vast majority of cases, they determine that in an effort to save money they do not have access to necessary coverage for their injuries, and it is usually too late. We use this time to educate them on the coverage that they should speak to their insurance brokers about should they need it again in the future.

It goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. I am not licensed to sell automobile insurance in Maryland. Nor am I a personal injury attorney in Maryland. I am not attempting to give legal advice or insurance advice. I am just looking to educate our followers on how available and affordable this new EUIM coverage is. I recently added it to my policy and to my wife’s policy and it added about 10 dollars a month total. To me, the additional premium of $120 per year makes me feel much safer on the road should the worst happen and should one of us become injured.

If you have questions about the new EUIM law and how it applies to you, you should contact your auto insurance broker. If you have suffered headaches, neck pain, back pain, or whiplash, you should contact Mid-Atlantic Spinal Rehab & Chiropractic at (443) 842-5500. We have your back on the road to recovery.

Dr. Gulitz