Comms: I wish for a quick and fully recovery for your wife. Thank you for taking the time to write this thorough summary of events. I have learned much useful from this thread that I want to implement in our family preps.




Just to give you a bit of perspective of how things works in weird corners of the globe: In my neck of the woods, insurance is for the car. It is the responsibility of the owner, not the driver. No insurance equals no license plates - literally. If you don't own the car but have a valid drivers license you can drive it and don't worry squat about insurance. I think this applies to most of Europe.

One particular interesting consequence is that if anyone crashes doing something illegal (reckless driving, drunk, stolen car, whatever...) the insurance company will pay any damage to others, but will reimburse the driver of the car. Big time. Squeezing money out of the offending driver is now the insurance company's problem - not the one who suffered a hit-and-run accident by some drunk felony. Big difference.

The U.S. car insurance system has some weird kinks in it that I never have fully understood, including some peculiar differences between states. But I leave that for the U.S. residents to deal with, not my problem.