Happy New Year.
I was just reading Kiplinger’s money magazine about car insurance rates. There is good news and bad news about it.
The bad news is car insurance rates are heading higher. The good news at least in the personal-injury field is that jury awards are not the culprit.
There seems to be a campaign by the insurance industry to blame your car insurance increases to runaway jury verdicts and excessive jury awards.
But according to the article in Kiplinger magazine, the reasons for the increased rates have nothing to do with car accidents and jury verdicts.
Rather, according to the article, increased rates are due to the rising cost of safety features. These includes sensors, cameras and computers in your car.
Even replacing a bumper on a new car with a distance sensor costs a lot more to repair than it did five years ago. Something as basic as replacing a windshield is more expensive than ever.
Other reasons for the car insurance hikes include the fact that there are more drivers on the road today than ever, and there is higher distracted driving because of iPhones than ever before.
Pittsburgh car insurance lawsuit attorney Bernie Tully could have told you that years ago.
If anything jury verdicts are much lower today then they were 25 years ago. Pittsburgh car insurance lawsuit attorney Bernie Tully knows this because he has been successfully handled car accident cases for over 25 years.
In fact, today juries are much more cautious about giving any money out than ever before.
This is very unfortunate because in my 30 years of doing car injury cases, I have had very few clients faking their injuries.
Most injury clients would gladly trade any jury award they receive to go back to their status prior to the auto collision.
Many times when an injury victim client of mine has a soft tissue injury which cannot be shown on an MRI or x-ray. So the defense attorneys will jump on this fact to say or imply the victim was not hurt at all.
And because of all the negative publicity of cases like the McDonald’s coffee case, injury victims of car accidents and other cases do not get a fair shake in the system.
These are some of things you should consider when asking your insurance adjuster why your rates are going up.
I hope everyone is keeping warm in this frigid weather.
Thank you for reading.
Bernie the attorney.