Medical Bills and Minor’s Settlements
June 4, 2019 § Leave a comment
Stacy, age 8, is injured in an automobile accident. Her medical bills are $17,000 for the hospital, $800 for ambulance and EMT, and $1,200 for miscellaneous doctors and other medical. Total is $19,000.
Whom should the judge order to pay the bills? Stacy? Her parents? Leave them unpaid? The questions seem almost absurd. Sould an 8-year-old child be expected to pay her own medical bills? Aren’t medical bills the kind of thing that parents provide for their children? But what if the parents don’t have the ability to pay? And if we leave the bills unpaid, what impact will that have on the ability of the parents to access medical care for Stacy in the future?
All of those questions are what the judge needs answered in the course of a minor’s settlement. But often those kinds of questions are left unasked. Worse … when I try to ask the petitioners (usually parents) why they want the bills to be paid out of the proceeds of a minor’s settlement, they have no clue about what I am asking. It’s obvious that the issue has never been discussed between attorney and client.
It’s been the expectation for a long time that medical bills for the child will be paid out of the child’s settlement proceeds. But that came into question after Gulfport Memorial Hospital v. Proulx, which you can read about at this link, which held essentially that medical providers do not have a statutory lien against settlement proceeds, and, therefore, they do not have the right to collect from them.
So when you ask the court to pay medical bills out of the minor’s settlement proceeds, you are asking the court to order the minor (or her guardian) to pay her own expenses. To accomplish that you have to put some evidence in the record that it is in the child’s best interest to order that. My suggestion is that you offer proof that: (1) the parents do not have the financial ability to pay; (2) ordering the parents to pay will impose undue financial hardship on the family; (3) the bills can not be left unpaid because those medical providers may refuse service in the future because of the unpaid balances.
I usually ask questions to elicit that information if the lawyers do not because I want justification in the record. Instead, what I get is blank stares. It doesn’t have to be that way. Prepare your witness. Be ready to put justification in the record for ordering the child to pay her own expenses.
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