3 ms·

"The hospital charged the couple’s insurance $180,000 for his care" - this sounded like a health insurance problem than car insurance.

Nifty3929 3y ago
Typically health insurance is first in line, but will then try to assign this to the proper insurance company based on who is covering the actual source of the damage. If it's just some health thing, then it stops with the health insurance company. But if it's a car accident (or work related, etc), the health insurance company will go after the car insurance company (or worker's comp, etc) as appropriate. This is fairly standard, but still there might be some arguing and lawyers and whatnot. The consumer/patient/victim is last in line and doesn't need to be overly involved in these arguments between insurance companies - but it does become a big problem if none of the insurance is enough to pay the bills, and the person who caused the damages doesn't have money either. The victim gets stuck with whatever bill is left. You can sue the at-fault driver, but that's little help if they don't have money. More effective is to plead mercy and negotiate with the hospital. If you owe them $200k, that's more their problem than your, if you don't have it. And they've already gotten maybe (hopefully) $100-300k from insurance anyway, so maybe they'll forgive the rest or setup a payment plan for $50k or whatever. None of this is good! But there really is no good outcome when someone gets smashed with a car. One reasonable remedy would be to increase the required liability coverage to $1M or more - enough to cover the amount of damage one can do in an automobile. Of course then only the people who care about these laws will have it. We'll still have an uninsured motorist problem. Now that I think about it, maybe they should make proof of car insurance required for registration. Why don't we do this already? Registration is much easier to enforce (there's a sticker on your plate in the US).
whimsicalism 3y ago
180k is a lot but also my guess is that having a trauma team work on you is quite expensive - pretty much no other time in someone’s life is someone going to be getting direct work from so many high-wage professionals. Note that the family was on the hook for ~4k. That seems to me to be insurance working as expected.
tptacek 3y ago
We don't have to have this unproductive debate, because you can just switch the scenario to an accident causing death and be right back where we started in terms of demonstrating that $100k coverage lines are not enough to cover the externalities of driving.

Nifty3929 3y ago

Typically health insurance is first in line, but will then try to assign this to the proper insurance company based on who is covering the actual source of the damage. If it's just some health thing, then it stops with the health insurance company. But if it's a car accident (or work related, etc), the health insurance company will go after the car insurance company (or worker's comp, etc) as appropriate. This is fairly standard, but still there might be some arguing and lawyers and whatnot. The consumer/patient/victim is last in line and doesn't need to be overly involved in these arguments between insurance companies - but it does become a big problem if none of the insurance is enough to pay the bills, and the person who caused the damages doesn't have money either. The victim gets stuck with whatever bill is left. You can sue the at-fault driver, but that's little help if they don't have money. More effective is to plead mercy and negotiate with the hospital. If you owe them $200k, that's more their problem than your, if you don't have it. And they've already gotten maybe (hopefully) $100-300k from insurance anyway, so maybe they'll forgive the rest or setup a payment plan for $50k or whatever. None of this is good! But there really is no good outcome when someone gets smashed with a car. One reasonable remedy would be to increase the required liability coverage to $1M or more - enough to cover the amount of damage one can do in an automobile. Of course then only the people who care about these laws will have it. We'll still have an uninsured motorist problem. Now that I think about it, maybe they should make proof of car insurance required for registration. Why don't we do this already? Registration is much easier to enforce (there's a sticker on your plate in the US).

whimsicalism 3y ago

180k is a lot but also my guess is that having a trauma team work on you is quite expensive - pretty much no other time in someone’s life is someone going to be getting direct work from so many high-wage professionals. Note that the family was on the hook for ~4k. That seems to me to be insurance working as expected.

tptacek 3y ago

We don't have to have this unproductive debate, because you can just switch the scenario to an accident causing death and be right back where we started in terms of demonstrating that $100k coverage lines are not enough to cover the externalities of driving.