But is someone is injured in a car accident, aren't medical costs from said accident covered by either their car insurance, or the other parties car insurance?
Did the Frost's fail to have insurance on their car as they are legally required to have?
Read on a thread yesterday. Father lost control of his car on “black ice” and hit a tree. I have no idea what type of insurance he was holding at that time.
I've seen no assertions either way on whether the Frost's vehicle insurance met the legal minimum requirements.
That said, they could have had much more than the legal minimun and it still would not have covered medical treatments for two people with severe brain injuries.
And the other "car" was a tree.
PERSONAL INJURY PROTECTION (PIP): Covers medical expenses, including funeral expenses, for you and your passengers who sustain bodily injury and the loss of income of an injured income producer, up to $2,500 per person. The purpose of the provision for PIP is to assure financial compensation to victims of motor vehicle accidents without regard to the fault of the named insured or other persons entitled to PIP benefits. Personal Injury Protection can be waived at a reduction in premium but such a waiver does not apply to a relative under the age of 16 while residing in your household.
So if the Frosts had the minimum mandated coverage, they would have only received $2,500 per injured family member. If their car/truck is new, the lien-holder might require other levels of coverage.
But is someone is injured in a car accident, aren't medical costs from said accident covered by either their car insurance, or the other parties car insurance?
Did the Frost's fail to have insurance on their car as they are legally required to have?
It was a single car accident so only the families car was involved. This is important because the legally required insurance is only liability which covers other drivers if you hit them. Since this was a single car accident liability insurance would not have covered it, only comprehensive/collision would have.
Now for the sake of arguement they did have comp/coll coverage chances are they went for the minimum coverage which would put medical at about 50K I think without looking it up. Even if they had a higher coverage though auto insurance would not have covered it all and health insurance would have had to pick up the slack.
From the articles sounds like they have an SUV, living in a good part of town, in Maryland. I don't know the year and make but chances are it was a newer model. In order to only have liability insurance they would have had to either pay for the SUV in cash OR financed it extremely short term (IE 36 month paid off in 6 months for credit purposes only). Both of those cases involve a bunch of cash available that also could have been used to pay for health insurance.
Another option to all this of course is who the car actually belonged to. If the car (like the house) was registered as a business vehicle and the auto insurance was business coverage then an accident in the car during non-business use would also not be covered by the auto-insurance.
Not saying either of these is correct, just saying these are a few possibilities. I'm sure there are more out there as well.
Excellent question.
To the limits of the policy, which depends on the level of protection the policy owner purchased.
It could be as little as a few thousand dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Depends on how much the insured was willing to pay, but anybody who refuses to purchase health insurance is probably going to be pretty stingy on the amount of automotive insurance they purchase as well.
PIP in Maryland has a low minimum requirement, about 2500.00 and I think I read the maximium amount of PIP is 20,000. Nowhere near enough to pay for the injuries these poor kids suffered.
But insurance is an interesting point. I'm sure Mr Frost has insured his home, his auto and his investment property but he chose not to purchase health insurance for his children which he could have at a reasonable rate.
Perhaps the public should kick in for his property insurance as well?
I know next to nothing about the Frosts, but if they had a business and minimally insured cars, they were playing with fire. An auto accident with another party can mean a lawyer plundering all your business goods, unless you have the business structured properly. They owed it to themselves to overinsure the cars, but it sounds like their other decisions weren’t so great either. OK, but don’t make me or other taxpayers pay for your poor decisions.