Expert: Claims Guy - 1/15/2011

Question
In August of 2010 I was involved in an auto accident that totalled my car(car 1) and the other person's car (car 2).Car 1 rear ended me and because our stories were conflicting (I said he hit me after I had established myself in the lane, he said I had changed lanes in front of him). Since the accident, both my insurance company and the insurance company of car 1 have declared me not at fault and offered restitution to my passenger, who was provided medical service after the accident.
A few days after the accident the insurance company (Allstate) of car 1 called me to conduct an interview. I answered everything as honestly as possible. However, one question they asked seemed inappropriate to me: they asked if I was on any medication. I was very flustered by this question, and I said no, I was not on any medication.
In actuality, I am on several maintenance medications that do not come with warnings about driving and are not associated with any sort of cognitive impairment. Additionally, I had been on the same medication in the same doses for about six months, so if there had been any cognitive effects they would have been apparent long before August.
My question is, is there any way for this to affect my insurance coverage, or the distribution of fault? I have never been asked a question about medication by my own insurance company, before or after the accident.

Thank you for your attention!

Meagan

Answer
This is a standard question and very appropriate.  It helps assess liability, just like many other questions.  If you answered honestly, you would have acknowledged taking the medication but said that it did not impact your driving at all.  They ask because some people are taking medication that does impact their driving and they need to know if this affects liability assessment.  They won't know unless they ask.

However, your answer should not have any impact on your insurance, because in this case, it did not matter that you were taking medication.  Providing false information to an insurance company can void coverage, and may be a crime, but only if the information is material to the investigation.  Since the medication did not impair your driving, your answer did not change the outcome of the investigation.  Therefore it is not material.