Who Pays Medical Bills Paid After a Car Accident in Pennsylvania?

Pennsylvania drivers are required to carry auto insurance. The system we use is a bit complicated with full tort and limited tort options available, but the point of insurance is always the same: to make sure that there is money available to pay for your injuries after an accident. Medical bills are of particular importance, with these systems in place to help ensure your medical bills get paid.

In Pennsylvania’s “choice no-fault” system, all drivers must have $5,000 worth of coverage to pay for their own injuries regardless of fault. This pays your bills first. Then, if that runs out, there are at least five additional ways to get medical bills paid. First, your insurance might have additional first-party benefits to cover you. Second, if you meet the standards to use the other driver’s insurance, you can file a claim against their liability insurance or, third, potentially sue them in court. There may also be other insurance that covers your case. Lastly, the option we usually seek to avoid is that you can pay your bills out of pocket.

For a free case assessment, call The Reiff Law Firm’s Philadlephia car accident lawyers today at (215) 709-6940.

How Pennsylvania’s Full Tort and Limited Tort Insurance Pays for Medical Bills in a Car Crash

The first place that you can turn to for covering your medical bills in a car crash is your own insurance. In a traditional “no-fault” insurance system, each driver has coverage for their own medical bills (and the medical bills of anyone else in their car) on their policy, and they are not allowed to sue. In Pennsylvania, every driver has to have at least $5,000 worth of medical coverage for themselves and their passengers on their insurance, but their right to sue for more damages depends on their insurance.

With full tort coverage, you are allowed to sue for any crash. With limited tort, you can only sue if your injuries are serious enough or if you meet other standards under 75 Pa.C.S. § 1705(d)(1); then, you can sue as if you had full tort insurance. Limited tort insurance is cheaper but usually means you have to rely more on your own insurance, and you can only sue for additional medical bills, lost earnings, and pain and suffering if you meet the exceptions.

Other Ways to Pay for Medical Bills in a Car Accident in Pennsylvania

$5,000 is not a lot when it comes to medical coverage. On top of that, both the full tort and limited tort options leave room for additional ways to get bills paid, and other insurance might cover damages for other reasons. At the end of the day, this leaves a few different ways to get damages covered, and if none of them apply to your case, you may be left to pay out of pocket.

Your Car Insurance

If you have limited tort insurance or you simply have a good insurance policy, there will be additional first-party benefits you can tap into on your own insurance policy to get your medical bills and other damages covered.

The first of these is additional medical and lost wage coverage. Some extraordinary injury policies even cover up to $1 million in benefits. Often, these damages have a deductible you have to pay.

Uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage (UM/UIM) can be used to have your policy pay you when the other driver doesn’t have insurance or has insurance that is too low to cover your needs. These benefits can be tacked on after you exhaust the other driver’s insurance (if they have it), and, depending on how you have this policy set up, multiple policies in your household might “stack” for added coverage.

Other Driver’s Liability Insurance

Drivers are required to carry liability insurance for those cases where the drivers they injure file a claim against them. If you were the victim and you meet the standards to file a claim against the at-fault driver’s insurance, they should have liability coverage to pay for your injuries and damages.

Pennsylvania’s minimum insurance requirements ensure that drivers will have at least $15,000 per person, $30,000 per accident for personal injury, and $5,000 for property damage. This means that, at most, you can get $15,000 from the other driver’s insurance to cover your injuries – but if they have better insurance, you can get more.

Lawsuits

If you meet the standards to sue in your case or you have full tort insurance, then you can file a lawsuit directly against the driver who hurt you. This means they can use their insurance to cover what they can, but additional damages can be ordered directly against the defendant. If they do not have much money, it might be hard to collect, however.

In cases where the driver was a commercial driver engaged in their job at the time of the crash, you can often sue their employer for your injuries in place of the driver. Our Pennsylvania car accident lawyers often use this tactic in truck accident and bus accident cases to help our clients get additional damages beyond what the individual driver can afford.

Other Insurance

Sometimes other insurance coverage you have might also pay for medical care after a car crash, depending on the circumstances. For example, many people have long-term or short-term disability policies through their jobs that might pay for medical care for a long-term injury. If an auto accident happened as part of your job, your employer’s Workers’ Compensation coverage might also kick in to cover your medical bills, though this can complicate the damages you get in a lawsuit against the at-fault parties.

Paying Out of Pocket

If all else fails and there is nothing else to cover your case, you may be able to pay out of pocket for expenses. In some cases, you might be able to do this first, then get them reimbursed through one of the methods above. In any case, if you do pay out of pocket, your health insurance or state/federal programs like Medicare and Medicaid should still cover medical care as normal – but they might do so only if other insurance options have been exhausted first. In any case, our lawyers recommend avoiding this, as the at-fault drivers should be the ones paying for the injuries they caused you.

Health Insurance

Injured drivers often pay for their medical costs with a combination of auto insurance and health insurance. Your auto insurance policy will often cover your medical bills up to the policy limit. If you have unpaid excess costs, your health insurance may kick in and cover the rest.

While many injured drivers are fortunate to have both forms of insurance, many others are not. Many people do not have health insurance through their employer and cannot afford to buy it independently. In the event of an accident, they can only rely on auto insurance, which might not be enough.

Paying for Medical Bills with Compensation from a Car Accident Lawsuit in Pennsylvania

While insurance can be helpful for some, other cases can run into trouble. Perhaps your medical bills are so high that your insurance cannot come close to paying for everything. Maybe you were struck by an uninsured driver, and there is no insurance with which to file a claim. In situations such as these and many others, a lawsuit might be a great way to get compensation to pay your medical bills.

Damages

Our Pennsylvania car accident lawyers must first help you assess your damages to get compensation in a lawsuit. Remember, much compensation is on the line in a lawsuit, not just coverage for medical bills. While your medical expenses are certainly a large part of your overall damages, they may also include the cost of vehicle repairs and the income you lose from being unable to work after the crash. There may also be other unique expenses specific to your situation that our lawyers can help you include in your claim, such as the cost of childcare while you are in the hospital.

You should also discuss how the accident affected you on a psychological or emotional level. Many injured victims express how traumatic the accident was and live with residual feelings of fear, anxiety, and depression long after the crash. For some, these feelings ripple across various aspects of their life and negatively impact their personal and professional lives. Although these painful experiences do not exactly come with a bill, you should be compensated.

Overall, it is vital to have a lawyer calculate these damages for your car accident case rather than relying on the insurance company’s calculations. Medical bills are going to be one of the simples and most straightforward areas of damages, given that there is a literal bill for how much the care costs. However, if you will need ongoing medical care into the future, we will need to calculate how much that will cost and get medical evidence of what procedures and treatments you will need. When it comes to calculating non-economic damages, we have multiple calculation methods we can turn to, applying whichever is best for your case.

Evidence

One of the hardest parts of your lawsuit that our team can help you with is finding evidence to prove your claims against the defendant. In a civil lawsuit, you must prove the defendant’s liability by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning it is more likely than not that the defendant is liable. To meet this burden, we need to show that it is more likely than not that they caused the crash by violating some kind of safety rule/traffic law or because their unreasonable, unsafe actions caused the accident.

To produce this proof, we likely need photos and videos from the accident scene. If you took pictures after the crash, or if there is security camera or dash cam footage of the accident, we can use these recordings to help prove your case.

We should also track down witnesses who saw the accident or have personal knowledge of details relevant to the accident. While witness testimony is sometimes skeptical, it can be very powerful, especially when witnesses have clear memories of the accident.

What if I Have Insurance from Another State?

If you were hurt in a car crash in Pennsylvania, but you have insurance from your home state, then your case might be a bit confusing. Depending on your home state’s insurance rules, you may have the same or similar kinds of restrictions on your insurance that require you to use your insurance first, then only allow you to sue for an injury after using your insurance. In this case, you might face the same limits on suing here in Pennsylvania. However, if your insurance essentially counts as a full tort policy under Pennsylvania law, you may be permitted to sue directly for your injuries.

In most insurance policies, there will be special provisions to cover you as required under the laws of another state if you travel into another state and get into a crash there. Even so, it is important to work with a local attorney in Pennsylvania to examine the terms of your policy, check what coverages you have, and help you file a lawsuit in Pennsylvania using our laws and procedures to get you the compensation you need.

Call Our Car Accident Lawyers in Pennsylvania Today

For a free analysis of your potential injury case, call The Reiff Law Firm’s West Chester, PA car accident attorneys at (215) 709-6940.