Quote Originally Posted by Biciclista View Post
When you are hit by a car while riding your bike, you do not have motor vehicle insurance to help you. You are at the mercy of the guy who hit you (if no insurance) or his insurance company.
Here in Washington this is not entirely true, because we have PIP (personal injury protection). I was hit by an uninsured motorist this summer. Because it was a motor vehicle accident *my* car insurance, even though I was not driving... is the first to kick in. My medical insurance won't pay any of it, unless/until the PIP benefits are exhausted.

This actually is a pain in the butt.... even though the collision was entirely the fault of the motorist (she turned left in front of me as I was going through an intersection on a green), I have had to go through all the insurance hassles. Of course when you go to the ER (turned out I was not severely injured, but my kneed immediately swelled up like a balloon and I couldn't bend it, so X-Rays were necessary) you say yes ma'am here's my insurance card, thank you very much... Not, hold on I need to file a PIP claim with my car insurance. So in the end I had to wait for my health insurance to deny the bills and then send them on to my auto insurance.

Here we are 4 months later and I'm still having to call the insurance company, call the hospital etc. to make sure all the bills are being paid. And my case was *not* a particularly complicated one. I had one ER visit with a set of X-rays to be taken care of. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would have been if I had been injured worse and had follow up care to claim too.