Medical Payments for Home Owners Insurance vs liability

[paulsiu]

In home owners insurance, there are coverages for medical payment. These appear to be for other people. I am wondering how important is this coverage and how much to carry.

From what I read, it is mostly a payment for people who tripped in your home, but I was wondering how different this is to personal liability. So if the visitor didn't have medical insurance or have deductibles, they can make claims against your insurance. The difference is medical payment appears to be no-fault while personality liability needs a lawsuit.

How important is this in say a retirement community, where the general population may have bad knees.

Paul

[Quasimodo]

Hi Paul;

Here's a recent discussion on medical payments:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=110463

John

[paulsiu]

Thanks for that link. I did see the yahoo link but missed the discussion.

So the insurance is to starve off a lawsuit, which gets covered by your liability. The question is how much to carry? So if your deductible is $1k, you should have at least $1K medical payment, so when it goes into effect and $1K should cover minor stuff. Chances are the person in a retirement community will have some sort of medical insurance so if the medical issue goes beyond that (breaks hip tripping over chair, etc), no simple amount of medical is going to cover it.

Paul

[Quasimodo]

Hi Paul;

I believe the deductible only applies to the property coverage and not the liability or medical payments coverages.

Out of curiosity I called our renter's insurance carrier and asked them what it would cost to increase our medical payments from $1,000 to $5,000 (their maximum for med pay). They said it would make no difference to the minimum premium we currently pay, so I asked them to increase the med pay limit. I think the cost to increase med pay would be pretty modest even if it didn't fall within the policy minimum.

John