PIP or personal injury protection or MedPay as it’s sometimes called under South Carolina law is an option that pretty much any insurance company is going to allow you to opt for. It’s not necessarily something they’re going to come right out and say it’s available because they don’t necessarily want you to get it.
You would have to pay a little bit higher premium in order to add it to your existing auto policy but the idea behind it is actually really, really good. It’s a no-fault policy that typically comes in denominations of either $1000, $5000 or $10,000 and the idea behind it is that that money, it doesn’t matter whether you were at fault. It doesn’t matter whether the other driver was at fault. You’re going to get that money in the event that you’re in a car wreck and you have existing medical bills that need to be paid.
It also doesn’t matter whether you have health insurance. It’s just a strictly one-time no-fault payment from your insurance company in the event that you’re involved in an auto accident and you’ve got existing medical bills that need to be paid.
This can actually be very beneficial because a lot of times, when you’re making an auto accident claim, there can be anywhere between a four to six-month delay before you actually get your medical bills paid because it takes that long for you to treat, for your lawyer to get all the records together, and for him to finally be able to settle it with the insurance company on a number that everybody is willing to agree to.
So in the meantime, you’ve got four to six months of debtors and creditors who are calling you saying, “Hey, we’ve got this existing EMS bill. We’ve got this emergency room bill that’s still outstanding and we fully and finally expect you to pay for it.”
If you don’t have the means to be able to pay for it, it’s going to affect your overall credit score. PIP is a perfect example of where that can be really a beneficial thing to have on your own auto insurance policy because it’s something that you get immediately from your insurance company and you can take it and pay your medical bills right then as opposed to waiting four to six months that you typically take in pre-litigation context for a car accident case.
The benefit being you have your medical bills paid, so you don’t have to worry about that one. The case actually settles. They’ve already been paid and that affects your bottom line because that means more of the money that you get from the defendant’s insurance company actually come to you in the form of a pain and suffering component.
So in that respect, PIP can be an extraordinarily beneficial thing to have and I would strongly encourage any South Carolina driver to go ahead an add it to their auto insurance policy. It’s maybe $10 or $15 extra a month and it can make a real difference.
If you have questions about PIP or MedPay, then I would strongly encourage you to pick up the telephone and call me at 843-300-7600 or feel free to look me up at The Hartman Law Firm.
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