Don't Let the Man get you Down

I was recently in my first car accident (as the driver) - I did make it 10 years of driving with out ever having an accident, if you can even call it that. I was backing out and saw a women flying around the corner. I stopped but she did not and she slid in to the side of my car. It was more of a fender bender but with her fender and the side of my car. The air bags did not go off, I was stopped and even if she was speeding through the parking lot, she couldn't have been going more than 35 mph max.

We decided to report it to insurance because the other party wanted us to just write her a check for her damages. This is when I knew we were in trouble.
Brian got in a car accident a couple of years ago and the insurance company refused to pay when they totaled out his car and the accident had a police report indicating the accident was not his fault. We lucked out, Brian worked for a personal injury attorney who helped us out for free.

This time we are not so lucky. The insurance company recorded my statement and headed out to look at my car when the other party called to report injury. REALLY!?!

So we had to schedule a time to come in to have the car looked at, then they had to look at the other party's car, take pictures of the scene and determine who's fault it was. In the state of Colorado, if an accident is in the parking lot, they don't necessarily determine who's fault it was but they give a percentage of fault to each driver in the accident. The preliminary outcome was that it was 100% her fault, but because she was claiming it was our fault and she was claiming her children were injured, the adjuster predicted it would be 10% our fault, 90% her fault.

Brian got the call today that our insurance decided to go with 50/50 fault. Brain asked why and they said because with the "injury" this is what they think her insurance company will accept. I have not had a chance to talk to them, but I am not happy with this. This means that we pay for our car damages and she pays for her car damages, I'm OK with that, but since she is claiming passengers in the car were injured, our insurance has to pay 50% of those medical bills. We don't have to pay a penny of that, but our rates will go up.

I know all the jokes about personal injury attorney's and being ambulance chaser but really insurance companies are just out for themselves and unless you threaten legal action nothing gets done.

50/50 will please the other insurance company and being what this accident was (basically nothing!) the insurance company knows that the medical bills will be minimal, our damages are way below our deductible, so they get to do minimal work, pay a couple buck to make much more money by jacking up our insurance rate.

If we would have gotten a police report, then fault would have been determined by the police station (which is located right next door to the complex, by the way), but even if we called the police, which we didn't, they would not have come to fill out a Police report because it was in a parking lot. So there was nothing more we could have done.

I have to get my thoughts together and then our insurance company will hear from me. I am usually pretty successful at getting bills reversed or explaining my issues, I even had a caterer send me apologetic flowers once - but I'm not feeling very confident about this phone call, because although they are a service agency and they do have competition, we have no choice - we have to have car insurance.

I just have to remind myself "Don't let the Man get you Down".

~ Nicole