Welcome to the Fine Print Museum. Please do not touch the exhibits, although in fairness nobody ever has.
Our first piece is a single sheet of paper, signed at an agent’s desk or clicked through on a website by a person thinking about the monthly premium and nothing else. It is the most consequential document in most Florida auto insurance files, and almost nobody who signed one can tell you what it says.
The offer the insurer is required to make
Section 627.727 of the Florida Statutes requires that no auto liability policy be delivered in Florida unless uninsured motorist coverage is provided, in an amount equal to the insured’s bodily injury liability limits, unless the named insured rejects it or selects lower limits.
That is a meaningful default. The law’s starting position is that your uninsured motorist coverage matches your liability coverage. Everything else is you opting out.
The opt out must be on a form approved by the Office of Insurance Regulation, and the statute prescribes a heading warning the insured that he is electing not to purchase certain valuable coverage, or is buying uninsured motorist limits lower than his bodily injury limits.
The word conclusively
Here is the exhibit’s cruelty. When that form is signed by a named insured, the statute provides that it is conclusively presumed there was an informed, knowing rejection of coverage or election of lower limits, on behalf of all insureds.
Conclusively presumed means you do not get to argue that the agent did not explain it. All insureds means your spouse, your resident children, and everyone else covered under that policy is bound by a decision one person made in ninety seconds.
Stacked and non stacked, and the twenty percent
Now the second half of the exhibit.
Stacked uninsured motorist coverage aggregates limits across the vehicles on your policy. Three cars with $50,000 in uninsured motorist coverage each can, in the right circumstances, produce $150,000 available to an injured Class I insured. Non stacked coverage limits you to one vehicle’s worth.
Section 627.727 permits insurers to offer non stacked coverage, with disclosure, on an approved election form, and requires a premium reduction of at least twenty percent for the limitation. Twenty percent off is a real discount. It is also a fraction of what you gave up.
And as with rejection, the Florida Supreme Court has held that a named insured’s non stacking election binds all insureds under the policy, including family members who never saw the form.
Class I and Class II, the distinction that decides the number
Florida uninsured motorist law divides insureds into two classes.
Class I insureds are the named insured and resident relatives of the named insured’s household. Their coverage follows the person. A Class I insured hurt as a pedestrian on Mariner Boulevard, or as a passenger in a friend’s car, or on a bicycle, generally carries the household’s uninsured motorist coverage with him, and Class I insureds are the ones who can reach stacked limits.
Class II insureds are permissive users and occupants of the insured vehicle who are not named insureds or resident relatives. Their coverage is tied to the specific vehicle they occupied, and they generally cannot stack.
The homework, which takes four minutes
Find your declarations page. Look for uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage. Confirm three things: that it exists, that its limit matches your bodily injury limit, and whether it says stacked or non stacked.
If it says rejected, you have made a choice that the law will treat as informed and knowing, and Florida does not require the other driver to carry any bodily injury coverage at all. Those two facts, together, are how a serious injury becomes an uncompensated one.
Fixing it costs a modest premium increase and one phone call to your agent. A Spring Hill car accident lawyer will tell you the same thing, usually while looking at a file where it is already too late.
External legal resource: Florida Statutes, section 627.727 (Uninsured and Underinsured Motorist Coverage)
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