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Somehow
the word insurance is beginning to have a different meaning to me
after the events of a few weeks ago. You know what insurance is,
the premiums you pay are just a long term pay out for the money
you may receive. You pay out a couple of thousand a year for your
home owners policy and as long as you don’t have a claim then everything
stays about the same. Put in a claim and watch those old premiums
rise to take in to account what the company paid out for your claim.
I’m not aware that anyone out there gives you any credit for the
years of premium you paid without having any claims.
Anyway, here is my sad story. A few weeks ago, I dropped one of
my sons off at a local store to buy some diapers for my granddaughter.
I am pulling through the parking lot about to drive back to the
front of the store to get my son, when a car starts backing out
into the moving lane of traffic. I can’t back up since there is
a car directly behind me. I didn’t honk since I thought the driver
was looking before he continued to back up.
That was my
mistake; he just keeps on going and plows into the front of my car.
I jump out and look over the damage, thinking he has stopped and
is coming back to see what he hit. Not so, he has driven off and
is about two miles away when I catch up with him at a red light.
I honk several times to get his attention and he finally rolls down
his window. I tell him I need for him to pull over so I can get
his insurance information since he just backed into the front of
my car.
He tells me...
“No, I’m not going to give you anything, I drive a big car and you
should have been able to see me.” I told him that you can’t back
up in a moving lane of traffic and that he needed to pull over.
He looked over and said… “I’m not going to give you anything, that’s
your fault…” and roars off down the road.
Now, I got
his license plate number and call it into the local police as a
hit and run. I have yet to hear anything from them. I don’t look
for them to do anything about this.
I call my local
insurance agent and tell them what happened. They give me a toll
free number to call in the claim. I do this and then wait.
And I wait.
And then I wait some more. In the meantime, I look up the owner
of the car through some public databases and find that the driver
is 93 years old. I am very glad I didn’t get into a physical confrontation
with him as I think it would bad to be physical with some 93 year
old guy regardless of what he had done to my car. I was able to
get his name, date of birth, license number, description of his
car, address and phone number. Then I call all of this in to my
insurance company for them to use.
Then I wait.
Then I wait some more. In the mean time my car looks bad, so I bite
the bullet and take it in and get it repaired. The total came to
something like $565.00. I call my insurance company again. They
tell me that it if I make a claim for this, my deductible is going
to be $500, so that means I’d get a check for a whopping $65 for
my trouble. If they are able to find the driver and get his insurance
to pay, then I might (note the word, might) get the entire $565.00
back if they placed a claim against the other drivers policy. However
they didn’t know if they were going to do that or not. I asked them
what was the next step and they said they had to assign it to an
investigator of claims agent to see if they could find the driver
of the other vehicle. I explained that I had in fact, given them
all they needed including the guys name, address and phone number.
They claimed they didn’t have that in my file and so I had to repeat
it once again.
I asked what
they were going to do with the information I gave them and they
said… “We’ll send him a letter and ask him to pay for the damage.”
Hello? I hardly think a 93 year that drives off and refuses to give
out any information is going to just roll over and write me a check.
The bottom line here is I don’t think anything will happen, much
less me ever seeing any part of the $565.00 I spent to get my car
fixed.
So, that means
I paid for coverage that doesn’t help, called the police who haven’t
done anything, gathered all the information necessary to identify
the driver who hit me, placed a claim and paid for all of my repairs.
There seems to be a breakdown in this situation and I’ll just bet
it happens to many of us each and every day and unfortunately there
doesn’t seem to be much we can do about it.
Must be a lesson
in here, but I’m having a hard time figuring out just what it is.
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