The involved drivers must share the information on their car insurance at the scene of a collision. Does each insurance company have an additional role to play in that unfortunate event?
A policyholder has signed a contract with a specific insurer.
The insurer has agreed to provide the policyholder with a satisfactory level of compensation in the event of a car accident. If the insurance company does not meet its obligation, then it becomes the policyholder’s right to file a lawsuit, and to hit the insurer with a charge of bad faith. The courts come down hard on an insurance company that has been shown to demonstrate bad faith. If a policyholder could prove that charge, any of the policyholder’s demands for compensation would lead to a tripling of the damage award.
When fighting a charge of bad faith, an insurance company examines the policyholder’s actions.
Policyholders are supposed to cooperate with their insurance provider. In the insurer’s mind cooperation should take the form of a willingness to provide the company with a recorded statement about the reported accident. Furthermore, insurers feel that policyholders ought to share all the relevant documents, when asking to be compensated by the insurance company. The withholding of documents weakens a charge of bad faith.
The conflict between rights and privacy
Citizens that want to preserve their rights must stand ready to sacrifice a bit of their privacy. At the same time, they must not work to preserve the privacy of those that could support their charges. Citizens that want to protect their privacy could put their rights in danger. That is especially true if any of those same citizens tries to protect the privacy of a possible witness.
The personal injury lawyer in Kitchener knows that the documentation that an insurance company hopes to obtain from a policyholder would include a collection of medical records. Some policyholders might want to preserve the privacy of their relations with one or more doctors. If that were the case, the same policyholders might refuse to hand to the insurer the entire body of requested documents.
If any of those documents include medical records, then the chance for fair coverage of a personal injury gets diminished. The policyholder might agree to a settlement well before the time when someone that had suffered an unseen injury had fully recovered.
That series of occurrences becomes more likely if any occupant of a vehicle that was involved in an accident happened to be a child or teenager. The parents might want to protect the child’s medical history. An accident has the ability to display the conflict between rights and privacy. The influence from the presence of the insurance company manages to magnify that same conflict to a greater extent.