Last year, 38-year-old, Samuel Milons Jr., was killed by a driver in Milwaukee. The driver suffered a seizure and lost control over the vehicle and crossed the median killing Milons. Following Milon’s death, Angela Minerick his fiancée racked up credit card debt as she could not afford to pay up the rent on their Milwaukee townhouse. However, Minerick who is a funeral director is far more secure with the thought that her son Samuel III will be able to afford college.
According to the auto insurance law of 2009, Minerick was allowed to stack two of her auto insurance policies and managed to collect $75,000, which is twice of what it may have been without the law. Now, Samuel has a trust that will support him after he turns 18.
However, beginning November 1, such cases may have different outcomes. This is due to the fact that one of the state Legislature’s first acts was to forbid policy stacking by companies.
There was a battle fought on the 6th of April, where insurance companies, lawmakers, as well as trial lawyers repealed the ‘truth in auto’ law and every aspect of it, except the mandatory auto insurance. Apart from the anti-stacking issues, the new law also lowered the minimum auto insurance requirements to 1982 levels.
The argument that was made by insurance companies was that the changes made in 2009 would result in higher premiums, where there will be many more that would go without insurance.
On the other hand, trial lawyers had invoked catastrophic situations where stacking or reducing clauses could easily make a difference in whether the accident victims go bankrupt or if they can pay up their bills. Both the parties tried hard to influence the Legislature by spending heavily.
During this time between 2009 and 2010, the advocates of both the industries pumped in around $336,319 into various campaigns of the state legislators, as per the data received from MapLight, which is a non-partisan California-based political money tracker.
The two industries also spent close to $1.1 million in addition to this while lobbying in 2009 – 2010 and most of it was spent fighting over auto insurance according to an analysis made by Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
After the change was brought in, insurance companies could insert the reducing clauses into the underinsured coverage. This could drastically reduce the amount that insurance companies will need to pay for accident claims.
