Home › Blog › Roughly 1 in 7 Drivers Has No Insurance. Here’s What That Means for Yours
The Insurance Information Institute estimates about 14% of U.S. drivers carry no insurance — in some states it approaches one in four. The cheapest hedge against them is a coverage most people have never reviewed.
Get hit by an uninsured driver without UM coverage and your options are: your own collision policy for the car, your health insurance for your body, and a personal lawsuit against someone who, statistically, has nothing to collect. Lost wages and pain and suffering mostly evaporate.
Uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage steps into the at-fault driver's shoes: it pays your injury damages the way their liability policy should have, including lost wages and pain and suffering. UIM covers the gap when their limits are too low — a $25K state-minimum policy meets a $100K injury more often than people think. It also covers hit-and-runs in most states.
UM/UIM typically adds little to a premium relative to what it covers, and insurance professionals — the people who see claims all day — consistently describe it as the last coverage they'd drop. Match your UM limits to your liability limits; insuring strangers better than yourself is the common mistake.
A UM claim turns your own insurer into the opposing party. Document injuries exactly as you would against a hostile carrier — because for that claim, they are one.