How Do My Medical Bills Get Paid For After A Car Accident?
Transcript
Hi, I’m Mike Hancock. Our clients often ask the question: “How do my medical bills get paid for after I have been in a car accident?” There is a number of sources that pay for your medical bills. The first source and the primary source after a car accident is your PIP or No-Fault insurance benefits. Everybody in Florida is required to have, at the very minimum, PIP coverage, also known as P-I-P coverage or Personal Injury Protection or No-Fault coverage. That’s the $10,000 policy that pays for medical bills, and it pays for 80% of every medical bill and 60% of any lost wages you have, up to its limit of $10,000.
Beyond that, your medical bills will be paid for by the other person’s insurance company, the bad guy’s insurance company. We call that the tortfeasor’s insurance company. And if they have something called Bodily Injury Liability coverage and there is, unfortunately, in Florida at this time, no requirement for the other person to have bodily injury coverage. But if they do, your medical bills that are not paid for by PIP will actually be paid for by the Bodily Injury liability coverage, but at a later date.
The other coverage that might apply is if the other person who caused the accident doesn’t have enough insurance, or doesn’t have any bodily injury liability coverage, then if you have uninsured motorist coverage, your medical bills will be paid for at a later date by your uninsured motorist coverage.
There is one other policy that may apply and that would be if you chose to purchase something on your own policy called medical payments coverage. A medical payments coverage may typically be, if you have it, somewhere in the range of $1,000 to $5,000 at most. And, if you have medical payments coverage, what that will do is in addition to your PIP paying 80% of every medical bill, then your Medical payments coverage will bring over 20% so all your medical bills will be paid for up to the limits of the combined PIP and medical payments coverage.
So those are the various methods by which your medical bills get paid for after a car accident. Your PIP and medical payments coverage pays for those within 30 days and then the coverage from the bodily injury liability and uninsured motorist coverage typically do not get paid for at least four to six months after an accident.
If you have any more questions, visit other parts of our website at lawhancock.com or feel free to give me a call and I’d be happy to get on the phone with you and answer any questions you may have about your case.
I’m Mike Hancock. Have a good day.