Court Opinion

ID: 9767118
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:10:27.29158+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:28.731175
License: Public Domain

GREENHILL, Justice
(concurring).
The insurance coverage purchased covered “accidental bodily injuries which you receive while you are driving or riding” in a car. So the insured person must receive some accidental injury in the automobile while driving. In my opinion there is no evidence of any accidental injury which the insured received while driving. The car was not struck. The car was being driven in an ordinary manner when the insured slumped over the wheel and died. His son grabbed the wheel and brought the car to a stop without incident. Certainly driving a car is not an accident. We do not drive down the highway, all the while having an accident as we drive. The overexertion in which the insured engaged took place on the farm, outside of the automobile. For these reasons, the Court correctly denied recovery on the policy.
It seems to me, therefore, that the Court goes to unnecessary length in saying that it must be proved that no other bodily conditions contributed to the death of the insured. Suppose, for example, that a man of middle age with a mild heart condition, known or unknown, is in an automobile accident, is thrown through the windshield, and breaks several bones. There is proof by autopsy that the insured had the imperfect heart and that a 100-percent healthy young person would have survived. But the older person with the heart condition died. Or suppose a person has hemophilia so that he bleeds more than other people. He is in a serious automobile accident, bleeds a lot, and dies soon thereafter. The proof is made, and it is established, that a well young person would not have died under the same conditions. To hold that there could be no recovery would be to say that accident victims must be in good health when they get accidently killed; i. e., if any physical defect or condition, known or unknown, contributed to the death of the victim, to whatever degree however small, the insured or his beneficiary could not recover. I am afraid this opinion would be a precedent for saying that there could be no recovery in such cases even though the insured actually died in, or immediately after, an automobile accident.
Many persons of middle or old age have something wrong with them. Accident insurance companies should have to take the people they insure as they find them unless there are some other more specific provisions as to good health in the policy, approved by the Board of Insurance.
The insurance contract speaks only in terms of “other causes.” It is unnecessary *116here to say that any contributing physical defect, however small, is a cause within the meaning of the policy. They might well be classified as conditions.
WALKER and STEAKLEY, JJ., joining.