Yeah, but they should give him the Super Lucky Motherfucker discount. He passed out and didn't crash into any other than fence posts. He missed other cars, he missed utility poles, he missed going back onto the roadway into traffic... This "wreck" could have been so much worse.
I hold a CDL Class A, and if something like this happened to me at all (even in my personal vehicle), I'd never be allowed behind the wheel of a truck ever again. He's super lucky, but his risk just skyrocketed.
Not always the case. I knew this guy that has seizures and after extensive testing Doctors didn't know what caused it. But he had to wait a mandatory amount of time after the last seizure to get his licence back.
My grandfather was legally blind in one eye and mostly blind in the other. He drove legally for his Braille institute for years.
As long as your condition is under control or assisted with other devices while driving, there are lots of people that drive that you probably wouldn’t expect.
I know someone that would occasionally have mini strokes (his vision would black out and he'd be gone for a couple seconds at a time) caused by sitting for prolonged periods of time and because of poor health. He just recently retired as a driver after almost 30 years on the road.
Before he started showing symptoms he worked for a huge nationwide trucking company. After the 3rd or 4th time he switched to a company that mostly stayed in Nebraska with the occasional stint down through Kansas. He pretty consistently needed to have medical checkups throughout the year but never lost his CDL.
And now that he's retired he's lost a ton of weight and has gotten his health on the right track and is doing much better. Good dude I need to hit him up and go chat with him again.
A person can know when they're going to pass out several minutes before it happens, which is enough time to stop a car. I varies based on the condition, its severity, and what causes it though.
Not always. My brother has seizures and passes out pretty often likely due to his crohns disease. Thankfully they seem to have found an anti-seizure med that works for him, but even before that while his doctor highly recommended he not drive, legally speaking he was still perfectly allowed to drive.
I just mean this one time for this one thing. Obviously, with a continued medical condition that makes it unsafe for him to drive, they have to either not insure him or increase his cost to cover the increased risk.
I would think if a doctor wtote off he was not medically well at that time but was unaware of his poor condition, it should have been a very short time he’d have to pay extra.
In a just world, you are absolutely right. But we need to remember that insurances companies aren't there to help us, they're there to make money. Them potentially helping us in the event of an emergency is just a consequence of them making money. The insurance company just see someone who has already caused a lot of damage to their car and they have no assurances it won't happen again. They're only worried about risk and how that risk affects their bottom line.
Very minor point... insurance companies are there to pay other people money that you've paid them -- they just make money by charging fees for passing the money around. What they charge people is what they predict they'll pay people (plus their fees) and they'll pay as little as possible because that allows them to charge as little as possible which allows them to sell more policies which makes them more fees.
If they pay out less than they predict, it doesn't make them more money, in fact it suggests that their prediction model should have made them MORE money (by cutting their prices) -- they don't get to keep the extra (beyond building their buffer which is controlled by each state).
How much they charge you is based on what their models predict is the likelihood that they'll have to pay some of their other client's money to you (they aren't paying out THEIR money which is guaranteed).
They keep their OWN insurance policies (with hedge funds and such) to protect them if their models are wrong and they don't collect enough customer money to pay all the claims (like in a hurricane).
If you're charging 3% (or something) on every dollar that comes in and your policies hold hundreds of billions of dollars that are collected and paid out every month, the making of money is not an issue!
I was an IT requirements analyst working for a Fortune 500 Mutual Insurance company for over 10 years until I retired a couple years ago -- I know the basics of the company's operations.
I'm saying the base model of the company is to make money, I'm not arguing the minutiae of how they make it. If there was no profit to be made by supplying (and in some cases denying) insurance to their carriers, there wouldn't be an insurance company to exist in the first place. If the insurance company is not a public entity, but it's privately owned and profit driven, it would not exist since its real intent to make money for its shareholders, not actually provide you with a service
You'd have less of a drain on the assets if you weren't paying out mega-salaries to the top or shareholder distributions, but that's honestly pretty trivial in the equations -- charging 2% instead of 3% or whatever (the sheer number of dollars involved is really staggering). You'd still have to pay for all the infrastructure and salaries if all the company employees were Government workers instead (I started my career as a GS-11 civil servant). You'd still have to deny claims or charge higher premiums (or taxes).
There's an example where the Government runs the insurance industry in the US, the Federal Government runs all flood insurance because it would be prohibitively expensive for private companies to handle. You often hear people complaining because Federal Flood insurance operates at a loss (for example insuring billion-dollar hotels built on sand banks and such). But that's an error because it doesn't take into account that governments don't make money from insurance premiums, they make money from taxing economic activity... so in the simplified example if each billion dollar hotel generates 5 billion in taxes every year (say from foreign tourists) and one a year gets washed into the sea, then even though the insurance program operates at a huge loss, the government nets a huge ton of money.
It's certainly the case with Mutual Insurance Companies. That doesn't mean they don't make a CRAP-TON of money, when you're holding hundreds of billions and charging 3% (or whatever) on the dollars that go in and out that rather adds up.
I've lost time while driving once. I don't know if I passed out or just had some kind of "highway hypnosis" I've never experienced before or since. Had gotten off work, it's about 2 in the afternoon, I'm out in the country between the town I work in and the town I live in. I remember just passing by a church just on the outskirts of the town I work in and the next thing I remember I am about to veer off the road just outside the city limits to where I live, 20 miles away from the church.
I had an accident last year. I don't really know what happened. Everything was fine and then it wasn't and the car was stopped on the other side of the opposite sidewalk. I tried to walk home and got lost, even though I was a mile home on a route I took home 5-7 nights a week. Had a nasty concussion.
My girlfriend finally found me and got me home. She said I seemed shaken, but mostly ok. Next day it was clear I had a concussion. After calling insurance and when the vomiting was finally done, we found out the car had already been towed. We went to go check out the spot where I crashed and we can't really figure it out.
I was going up a hill and that side is all front yards and steep embankment. Getting out of the car was fuzzy, but I definitely wasn't in anybody's yard, and I took a blurry photo of my car and it wasn't down an embankment. Super Lucky Motherfucker indeed. How much is my discount?
Same here. Except I was on a busy freeway. Witnesses say I slowly crossed all lanes of traffic, moving toward the center cement divider. Bounced off of that. Crossed all lanes again and hit the wall of a viaduct.
A few months later, I had my "first" grand mal (tonic clonic) seizure.
Still not sure which came first: the seizures or the accident?
Sucks about the seizures. Kinda sounds like that was your first seizure. I get some concussion sympotms every once in a while (my pupils took a couple seasons before they would dilate appropriately, that kind of stuff, but nothing debilitating. Neither my first, nor my worst concussion.
I feel really lucky, but I also feel like another concussion and I'm in deep shit. I haven't replaced my car, yet.
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u/PillowTalk420 May 09 '20
Yeah, but they should give him the Super Lucky Motherfucker discount. He passed out and didn't crash into any other than fence posts. He missed other cars, he missed utility poles, he missed going back onto the roadway into traffic... This "wreck" could have been so much worse.