Okay, let’s talk about your insurance policy for a minute. MedPay on your car, and if you can get it on your bike, is a very useful tool. MedPay is what we call “no-fault insurance.” It doesn’t matter who was at fault, if somebody’s injured, it’s going to cover it, and it’s going to cover medical bills. MedPay is really extremely useful if you have health insurance (or if you have no health insurance, of course it’s useful because it gets medical bills paid.) But if you have health insurance and you have a deductible, well that deductible could get really expensive. MedPay can help pay that. There are other really good uses for MedPay.

Using Medpay For… Rent?

You see… (and again, this may be policy specific, so you have to take this on a case by case basis. So I’m talking broadly, maybe not about your policy specifically, but I’m always happy to sit down and read that policy with you.) MedPay could be used to cover other things as well. For example, let’s say I get hit, I’m injured, I go to the hospital and I give them my health insurance.

Let’s say you have health insurance, and you get a $10,000 bill from that emergency room. You see, if you have to pay for it yourself, maybe you get a cash discount, maybe you don’t, maybe they really charge you the $10,000. But if you have health insurance, what’s going to happen is your health insurance has already pre-negotiated a discount for you. You’re part of this collective bargain, that’s part of what your premiums went to, was to get you a better bargain at the hospital.

So we have a $10,000 bill and your insurance has already pre-negotiated that down to $3,000. Well, great. That $3,000 gets paid by your health insurance or it goes towards your deductible. Your MedPay still has to pay, even if your health insurance covers it! Your MedPay still has to pay. And it doesn’t have to pay the hospital. You can direct your MedPay to pay you, which means that you now get, if you had a $5,000 MedPay policy, you get $5,000 in your pocket, and you can use that for a variety of reasons.

If you direct your car insurance company to pay you directly, then you have some flexibility. Let’s say that you’re out of work, you can use some of that MedPay money to pay rent. Let’s say that you want to use it towards the deductible. Let’s say you need to put food on your table, because again, you have a broken leg, you work a job that requires you to have a functioning leg. Well great, your MedPay can go to help cover that.

Health Insurance For Medical Expenses. Medpay For You.

Always give them your health insurance, unless you absolutely have to, and again, I don’t want to cover every situation possible, but generally I would not give them my car insurance because my health insurance is going to be much more effective at paying those bills than my car insurance is. And sometimes hospitals get awfully excited about trying to pursue the car insurance when they really should be billing to health insurance. Same thing with MedPay.

Now, again, there are some exceptions, you may want to consult with an attorney. Sometimes there may be people that have liens on that money. So again, this is not every case. There are times where Medicare or Medicaid may have a lien on that amount of money, and you may actually be obligated to give that to the health insurance company. So again, it’s a case-by-case basis, but what you don’t want to do is give that to the hospital, because if you give it to the hospital, then… Hospitals love it when they get that, because they don’t apply their discount to the MedPay.

So, use your health insurance to get your hospital discount. That’s why you pay your premium, it’s there. You get part of the discount, part of the club, use it. Direct your MedPay to either pay yourself directly, or you can have it go directly to your attorney, and then you can use that MedPay to do the things you need to do, assuming there no lien on it. MedPay is usually pretty inexpensive, it’s really great coverage, and there are plenty of times where MedPay has made a huge difference in my clients being able to put a much larger recovery into their pocket. So if you have the ability to get MedPay on your bike, fantastic, on your car for certain, think about getting MedPay, and I think that you’re going to find it’s a good investment.