Panama City Florida Injury Lawyer Blog

Auto insurance is baffling to a lot of people. So many coverages exist that deciding which kinds to buy can be confusing. For your safety, I'd rather you make decisions about your coverage now. When you have a wreck, it's already too late to buy it. I represent injured people against careless drivers who hurt them and destroy their vehicles. It's what I do all day, everyday. So in the years that I've represented thousands of car and truck wreck victims, I've learned about the best types of coverage for protection.

In these hard financial times, two kinds of auto insurance are in the must-have category. Going without them can be more costly in the long run than buying them now. The two essential coverages are UM and GAP. The letters stand for uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage and guaranteed auto protection. Why is it so important to have them now? Because more and more car owners are driving without any auto insurance or with inadequate insurance. They can't afford to buy it. So when they hit you, unless they're financially well off, you're not likely to get enough money for your injuries or for car replacement. It's not a nice situation to be hurt, not be able to work due to the injuries, and watch the bills piling up on your table. And the loan company to which you owe more than the car was worth is yelling for its money.

Your next question is likely to be: How could these coverages help me? When you buy bodily injury or BI coverage, you do it to protect your assets in case you hurt someone else. In Florida, if you don't sign a written rejection of UM coverage, you automatically have it in the same amount as your BI coverage. So if the other driver didn't buy bodily injury coverage and hurts you, your own uninsured motorist coverage (remember the other driver is uninsured) steps in, takes the place of the insurance the at-fault driver should have bought, and pays you. It pays for your medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering. It works similarly if the other driver didn't buy enough BI coverage to pay the full value of your injuries. Never reject UM coverage when you're buying car insurance.

Now, let's switch to GAP insurance. If your new car, which is financed, is destroyed, say 10 minutes after your drive off the dealer's lot, you've just lost a lot of money. As you drove away, it depreciated by 20-30 percent, because it became a used car. You now owe more to the finance company than it's worth. GAP coverage will pay the difference in the used value of the car, which your insurance would pay to you, and the amount financed. Don't leave home without GAP coverage on new or nearly new vehicles. Get and keep these two important coverages, uninsured motorist and GAP, especially now that the number of uninsured and underinsured drivers has increased.

When you pay for a life insurance policy, you expect it to take care of your family after death. Last week, I told you about post claims underwriting which is a legal way for an insurance company to avoid paying a policy if death occurs within two years of the policy's effective date. When an insured person dies within two years, the insurance company gets all the old medical records and examines them closely to see if the insured person ever had a condition that, if disclosed to the insurance company in the application, would have enabled it to ask for more premium. If so, our law permits it to deny making payment to the deceased person's family. The condition doesn't even have to be life threatening.

Many people aren't sophisticated enough in medical matters to realize if they've had some conditions asked about, and the life insurance agents, who read the application's questions to a customer and fill in the blanks, often don't want to explore the past medical history in depth. Finding out about past medical problems is against their financial interest. They want to sell the policy and move to the next customer's house to sell another.

Here are some ways to guard against this problem and to better ensure that your life insurance policy will insure you if you die within those critical first two years of the policy.
As a beginning, don't trust the life insurance companies and their agents. Insist on reading the application, and fill it out yourself. An agent hurrying to make a sale isn't as interested in accuracy as you are. I won't let one of them fill out my insurance application. Second, some companies offer online insurance products. Buying online is okay, but read the application slowly and carefully before clicking the mouse. Consumers click a mouse to answer several questions containing multiple health issues, sometimes not reading carefully. So if multiple ailments are included in a single question, and one is overlooked, it's easy to buy a policy that upon death isn't going to pay. Third, consider keeping your own medical history by jotting down in a notebook or on a computer list every visit you make to a doctor or hospital, when you went, and what the visit was for. Give a copy of it to the insurance agent, and insist it be attached to the application and made a part of it. When your policy is issued, if the history was included, you'll see it attached to your application which is a part of the policy that you'll receive. If it's not there, the agent didn't do his or her job. Call the agent immediately, and by using firm language, get the problem fixed.

If you'll do these things, you will have gone a long way toward protecting your family from the insurance company that cares only about making a profit.

Continue reading "Ensuring That Your Life Insurance Policy Insures You" »

Just the thought of buying life insurance makes people shudder. But far worse is the thought of the insurer refusing to pay the policy when death does occur. It happens every day. Families get letters from insurance companies saying the money they expected to survive on isn't coming after all.

Most states, including Florida, specify that for two years after life insurance is bought, the company can contest its validity by claiming that a material misrepresentation was made in the application for insurance. Although the two-year period is a narrow window, it catches too many families and destroys their finances at a very bad time, often following the death of the family's main bread winner.

The process I'm describing is called postclaims underwriting. When an insured person dies within this two-year period, the insurers get every scrap of past medical records and use a microscope to examine them to see if there had been any undisclosed medical condition. Under most laws, it doesn't have to be a condition that would have led to death, only a condition for which a little additional premium would have been charged. Incredibly, under our law, that's enough for an insurer to deny the death claim and refuse to pay the policy.

In my experience, most misrepresentations aren't intentional but result from the consumer's lack of sophistication in medical knowledge when filling out the application. They also result from the insurer's slipshod practices in not adequately investigating potential customers' health before rushing out to collect the policy premiums. Only if the laws are changed will the purchase of life insurance guarantee the safety of our families once we depart this life. Until then, only the profits of insurance companies are guaranteed. As a California court has said, "If the insured is not an acceptable risk, the application should be denied up front, not after a policy is issued." In that state, postclaims underwriting is permitted only when the insured intentionally misrepresents his or her health. Why don't insurance companies investigate the facts stated in an application before issuing the policy? Easy. Without doing that, they can immediately start to collect premiums. Present law permits exactly that.

So what do you do to protect your family besides wish for backbone from our legislators to pass better laws? As a start, you don't trust life insurance companies and their insurance agents. The agents usually earn commission based salaries and get promotions for increasing business. They don't want to find out about customers medical impairments. They don't make money by finding out your problems and accurately writing them down on the applications. There are good ways to protect your families. Next week, I'll tell you about them.

More and more of us are doing a major portion of our shopping online. With tight schedules and many sites offering free shipping, why not do it all from the comfort of your home? With a little due diligence and attention to certain items on a web page, you can save yourself some grief later.

When shopping online, it is best to stick to the stores you're familiar with. There may be that 'too good to be true' offer that comes to you via email. Chances are, it is too good to be true but with a little research you can determine if it's a great deal or just a scam. A quick Google search of the company name may reveal prior customer reviews. Read them to see if any have had bad experiences.

When adding items to any site shopping cart or in places where your personal information is entered, you should see a lock symbol at the lower right indicating it's a secure site. The other indicator of a secure site is in the web address itself. It would start with "https", the "s" indicates it is secure.

When checking out and paying for your items, always use a credit card when ever possible instead of entering your checking account information. It's much easier to dispute a charge than to fight the bank as unauthorized money is withdrawn from your account.

Many sites will email order confirmations. If you receive one but haven't ordered from that site recently, be cautious. Instead of clicking a link to reach the site, go directly to that site and review recent orders. This new SCAM has been resulted in many unsuspecting people entering in their personal information leading to identify theft.

This is the time of year when many will feel charitable and fall victim to phony charity sites. Do your homework and find out how much of the funds donated actually go to the cause. Check out sites such as Charity Navigator to see percentage distribution of donations or check with the Better Business Bureau.

Continue reading "Protect Yourself Againsit Holiday Scams" »

Today's toys are not your parents' toys. Toys have grown in sophistication, but so have their dangers. Most parents have always had the sense to watch for small objects that might choke a child or sharp pieces that might cause harm, but today's toys feature unseen hazards. Now, the danger comes from lead, cadmium, asbestos and other carcinogens undetectable to the eye or small, innocent looking magnets that, once swallowed, can rip a child apart from the inside.

In 2007, 45 million toys had to be recalled. Between 2004 and 2008, toy-related injuries increased 12 percent. This increase has coincided with a marked increase in imported toys, especially from China. The U.S. imports more than 30,000 tons of toys every year from foreign markets, accounting for 95 percent of toys sold. Dangerous products are hitting the market, so during Christmas buying, you must exercise caution.

The vast majority of products recalled last year came from outside the U.S., maybe because foreign manufacturers are able to operate without facing the same rules of accountability that U.S. manufacturers abide by. Unfortunately, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is woefully under-resourced to cope with the flood of products entering our country. Until 2007, the CPSC had only 15 inspectors to monitor all ports in the U.S. for all products and only one employee to conduct safety tests on toys. The result of such corporate negligence and regulatory powerlessness is that dangerous products are sold for years before the public has any idea of their hazards. A Public Citizen analysis of consumer recalls found that companies waited an average of 993 days to inform the CPSC of defects, and the agency then waited another 209 days before informing the public. Four years are lost. During that time children die.

In this report, I cannot do justice to a description of how effective our civil justice system is in stemming this tide of dangerous imports by bringing lawsuits to make it too expensive for the bad manufacturers and importers to continue their activities, but I can tell you some things to look for to avoid dangerous toys for your children or grandchildren during the Christmas buying season. In a nutshell, avoid Chinese products. Look at the labels telling where a product is made. If it was made in China, strongly consider rejecting it. Those products often contain lead, asbestos, or other components that can be fatal. Products containing magnets are also horribly dangerous. Magnets can come off and be swallowed. Then, with other magnets that are swallowed, they cause constrictions in the intestines that can result in death. Also products containing darts and small parts like balls can cause children to choke. Be cautious when shopping for toys to keep your kids safe.

Most hip implant surgeries are uneventful, but last week I told you about problems associated with one brand of hip implants often used by orthopedic surgeons in this area and promised to go into more detail this week. Hip replacements are usually done to cure the pain of painful arthritis that occurs naturally or after trauma like that experienced in auto accidents. One manufacturer has had considerable trouble with its implants because of the way they are made.

Depending on where you come from its name is pronounced "De-pwee" or "De-pie." Either way, it's a Johnson & Johnson company whose product is a metal on metal design that has a cup that's too shallow for the ball. The result is loose fragments of metal floating in the joint and loosening of the implant. The loosening and the metal fragments cause damage that often result in another painful and very costly surgery to replace the DePuy implant with a better designed implant.

Patients who have the DePuy ASR or ASR XL models can have crunching or popping noises in the hip, difficulty standing or walking, hip fracture or dislocation, unusual fatigue, muscle inflammation or infection, and death of some of the muscle tissue around the implant.

That's not the whole story. Excessive friction between the metal cup and the metal ball release cobalt and chromium ions into the body causing, among other things, heavy metal toxicity or aseptic lymphocytic vasculitis associated lesions resulting in bone loss. Metallosis causes its own unpleasant consequences. Among them are spontaneous dislocation, nerve palsy, groin and thigh pain, fatigue, and intense pain at the site of the hip replacement.

An orthopedic center at the University of Oxford, England, found that benign tumors called pseudotumors can form around the hip prosthesis. Additionally, progressive bone deterioration is not uncommon. Metalosis can also result in muscle necrosis, that is, muscle death, around the site of the surgery. The release of metal ions in the blood stream, caused by the metal on metal construction of hip implants, is of great concern due to potential long term toxicology including immune system changes, chromosomal damage, and cancer according to researchers at Cambridge University. It is known that the metal ion levels from this type of prosthetic design are significantly higher than normal values in the body, and changes in the immune system to cobalt and chromium ions were in fact detected by researchers at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Surgery for a fractured thigh bone or other bones and accelerated future revisions nearly completes the list of problems, so if you have one of these implants and are having any adverse symptoms, it is in your best interest to consult with your orthopedic surgeon as soon as possible.