Barn Owner Use of Boarding Horse

[candyappy]

@RMJacobs

I had a lot of sneaky phone calls from my health insurance, trying to find someone to pin liability on. I wasn’t going to tell them my husband had parked the car at the top of the driveway–suing him is just like suing me. I was able to deflect all these inquiries and ultimately my health insurance did pay for treating my inuries, but it would have been easy to say the wrong thing and have them at least deny the claim.

They probably would have tried to get payment from your car insurance, but I doubt they would have denied paying for your injuries?

I slipped on the ice here in late Jan and broke my ankle. I have been contacted several times by my health insurance company trying to find out if by some chance someone else can be liable for my injury.

I guess that is just what they do now. They have paid, thankfully.

[RMJacobs]

@candyappy

They probably would have tried to get payment from your car insurance, but I doubt they would have denied paying for your injuries?

I may have totally forgotten to mention the involvement of the car. I told my insurance it was an equestrian accident, my horse, my land.

Rebecca

[candyappy]

@RMJacobs

I may have totally forgotten to mention the involvement of the car. I told my insurance it was an equestrian accident, my horse, my land.

Rebecca

Probably a good move on your part

[SonnysMom]

I am not sure why I am going to bother to type this but I will anyway. I worked paying medical claims for 31 years. I have NEVER seen a insurance company actually sue the responsible party. What we were looking for on the questionnaire was to make sure if the injured party sued that the medical insurance received reimbursement from that settlement.

The injured party’s lawyer will provide documentation showing that there was say $100,000 in medical bills so they sue for that. In reality the medical insurance got a discount of 20% and paid everything but the deductible and out of pocket limit. The injured party only paid $5,000 and the Insurance company paid $75,000. ($20,000 was the write off amount for the discount).
If the injured party is awarded reimbursement for medical bills as part of the settlement the insurance company wants to be reimbursed for the portion they paid.
For car accidents they want to coordinate benefits with the automobile insurance just like they would if you had 2 medical insurance companies.
Think about it, how successful do you think a lawsuit would be if the injured party wasn’t on board with the lawsuit and said in testimony/deposition that it was their own fault or the other person wasn’t at fault.
Once again in 31 years of working with a variety of insurance companies and going to industry educational seminars I have never known a medical insurance company to actually try to sue someone. Once again if the injured party decides to sue they want to know about it and get reimbursed.
IME the medical company would accept the $75,000 less the lawyer fee. So if his fee was 33% they would accept $49,950 if the court awarded the full amount of past medical bills.

The injured party should not make money on their medical bills. Without subrogation they can and lawyers will collect for amounts the patient wasn’t responsible to pay.
Medicare and Medicaid use subrogation too.
Yet everyone complains about the high cost of medical premiums and don’t like when the medical insurance company tries to control costs. If they cannot control costs the premiums go up to cover those costs. Simple math.
Sorry for the rant.

[Libby2563]

Interesting discussion on subrogation. When a seller’s horse flipped over and landed on me last year I kept expecting one of those questionnaires but I never received one. Insurance paid for numerous x-rays and ortho appointments, a couple of MRIs, and months of PT without ever asking how the injury happened.

[miminorthwest]

Yes exactly, the horse is used for liberty/ground work and the odd trail ride. This is a semi-retired older dude who is still fit and sound. The HO/my friend does extremely light riding, mostly liberty stuff, this horse gets it’s jollies out in the field and doesn’t need lunging before work.