No-fault is necessary for Gun Insurance

No-fault is necessary for Gun Insurance

A new posting on YouTube by this blog.

Good insurance for protecting persons injured by guns has to be no-fault. No-fault insurance does not require showing the INSURED person – the gun owner – has been negligent. It can be based on victims having their own insurance. But that isn’t the way for gun insurance. In most areas such as cars and jobs with worker’s compensation insurance – the vehicle or company owners take out the insurance.

The video can be accessed at

https://youtu.be/yLOWV9MWPpA

Script

We need to require good insurance to compensate victims of gun violence.

One of the most important principles for effective insurance is that it must be no-fault.

If error or misbehavior on the part of the shooter or of the injured person has to be weighed before benefits can be given, they will be too late and too uncertain.

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Good insurance for protecting persons injured by guns has to be no-fault. No-fault insurance does not require showing the INSURED person – the gun owner – has been negligent. It can be based on victims having their own insurance. But that isn’t the way for gun insurance. In most areas such as cars and jobs with worker’s compensation insurance – the vehicle or company owners take out the insurance.

A requirement to prove negligence on the part of the insurance buyer is the biggest barrier to insurance being effective for gun injuries.

This may be because the gun owner is not be the shooter.

Many incidents happen when someone else has the gun.

Perhaps, kids in the household have found an improperly stored pistol.

Perhaps, the gun is in the name of an illegal straw purchaser who bought it for her felonious boyfriend.

Perhaps the gun was stolen.

There are many possibilities.

And, it’s hard to prove what happened in an incident.

The shooter is likely to deny responsibility or

To claim it was an unavoidable accident OR

That the victim was in some way responsible.

The person who was shot may have died and only one side of the story is available.

And, then, many states have STAND-YOUR-GROUND laws which block responsibility.

The other side of the fault concept is “blaming the victim.”

This seems to be so common whenever someone is afraid of being responsible for their actions.

From saying it’s the kids fault for getting in the forbidden closet — to saying that the late night visiting friend, unfortunately, seemed to be a criminal breaking in the house, there’s always a way to attempt to shift responsibility.

These issues will take years to settle if it’s done by the legal system.

But the needs of victims are there regardless of fault.

The needs are immediate.

The victim may be dead or lack the means to press a complex claim and to fund a law suit.

The insurers have a massive incentive to fight to the end and to resist.

This is both because the claims can be very large — and because a reputation for an insurer being tough prevents future claims from others.

Running out the clock is an effective strategy for those who don’t want to pay.

But the no-fault concept avoids these problems.

Just two factors to determine benefits—the nature of the injury with resulting needs and that the covered firearm was involved.

So we can concentrate on being able to identify guns to know the proper place to make the claims.

Tracking serial numbers and sampling projectiles or casings can be of potential use.

If most incidents have identifiable insurers, an uninsured gun fund can be established which would be similar to the uninsured vehicle funds found in some states.

No-fault especially simplifies the use of non-monetary benefits such as medical care.

These are for the most time sensitive needs.

There just isn’t time to determine responsibility for the shooting before treatment in an emergency room.

Even payments for burial in fatal cases can’t wait for years.

Certainty and speed go hand-in-hand in providing for real needs.

And, there are other time sensitive needs.

Lost work can so damage the finances of a family that it falls apart — and this can happen quickly.

The injured person can be disabled temporarily or permanently, leaving dependent survivors destitute.

Per-diem payments for lost work should start right away and are provided for in many other kinds of insurance such as worker’s compensation and automotive personal injury protection systems.

The no-fault concept has proven effective in diverse areas when insurance is required by law for those engaging in specific activities.

For example, some states have their automobile insurance systems basically no-fault.

In most cases, this means that you would collect first from your own insurer.

But, if you are in a category, such as being a pedestrian, which does not require insurance, then you can collect on a no-fault manner on the insurance of the car which hit you.

Seventeen states require that car owners have personal-injury-protection (PIP) insurance which covers injuries to people in the insured car in a no-fault manner.

Where the purpose of the insurance is to encourage confidence in the safety of an activity or to compensate those harmed by the activity rather than those ENGAGED in the activity, no-fault is by far the better approach.

There are some interesting federal programs that are essentially no-fault insurance.

One is the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The Health Resources and Services Administration says: “The V I C P is a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury petitions.”

Another is the fact that the so-called “liability” insurance requirement for Nuclear Accidents was amended in 1966 to be no-fault.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says “Price-Anderson claimants would need to show only (1) personal injury or property damage, (2) monetary amount of loss, and (3) causal link between the loss and the radioactive material released.”

The most important no-fault system we have is our Worker’s Compensation system.

This is why it’s the best model for the benefit system for gun insurance.

One is only required to show the injury with a need for compensation or medical services and that the injury was incurred on the job.

Insurers know that prompt and effective medical care is cheaper in the long run.

So that have established a wide variety of systems in various states provide that care.

We need to require gun insurance; and, if it’s going to work to mitigate deaths and injuries, it has to be no-fault insurance.

Good Gun Insurance pays benefits directly to victims

Good Gun Insurance pays benefits directly to victims

This has been posted to YouTube. The link is https://youtu.be/yv_zt2-MkJw Take a look.

We need a system of required insurance as a tool to fight the tide of gun violence in this country. The insurance has to be adapted to the needs of the situation, as insurance is in almost every area. It needs to be real insurance to compensate the people who get shot and their families. Insurance designed just to hold gun owners and shooters responsible won’t cut it.

The time has come legislate such a system. There are some principles which would cause the system to work on a practical level, reduce the carnage and mitigate the damages. They include:

  • Direct payment to the injured persons, their families and medical providers.
  • Insurance that pays on the basis of the injury not fault by the shooter
  • Insurance with a system to cover all of the guns

This video is organized by this outline:

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Calls for Gun Insurance from the 2019 Political Realm

Recent mass shootings have awakened a large portion of the public to the dangers of guns and many politicians have responded. The political possibilities of adopting a mandate for insurance to benefit victims of gun violence have never been a high as they are now. If this trend continues, hopefully by a means other than more shootings, then it may become realistic to adopt measures on a national level.

The Mayor of San Jose, CA has a plan to require gun insurance in that city and has published an editorial on the Subject in the Washington Post. This plan covers “intentional acts of third parties who steal, borrow, or otherwise acquire the gun” but not the liability of a policy holder for intentional acts. It could be expanded to cover these acts by paying benefits directly to victims.

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Insurance vs. Laws and Regulations

Insurance vs. Laws and Regulations

The laws and regulations we use for gun safety in our country have provided only limited relief from the high level of gun injury and death. While they need to be extended and improved, other ways of protecting people are also important. One that would be extremely helpful is to require insurance that protects victims of gun violence.

Laws and Regulations

For decades there has been a war between those who want reasonable regulation of gun ownership and use and those who feel that any restrictions applied to guns are the start of a slippery slope leading to total gun confiscation. The result has been a patchwork that provides substantial impediments to responsible gun ownership as the pool of irresponsible owners and dangerous guns has increased exponentially.

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HR-2546 Firearm Risk Protection with Suggested Personal Injury Clause

Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY-12) has introduced a bill, HR-2546, to require insurance for firearm transfers again in the congress.  The bill has been co-sponsored by representatives: Blumenauer (OR-3), Clark (MA-5), Grijalva (AZ-3), Lynch (MA-8), McGovern (MA-2), Rangel (NY-13), and Tsongas (MA-3).  It is a requirement for liability insurance for sales of firearms.  As introduced it does not specify the amount of insurance required or the parties to be protected by the insurance.

This blog has pointed out many times the limitations of the liability insurance model for protecting victims of gun violence; but many people easily see the parallels between the car insurance requirement and the need for gun insurance.  Liability insurance, as implemented in various states for the protection of people injured by cars, is often modified by the provisions of a mandate to be in a form which, while called liability insurance, is really based on some other insurance system.  These systems are typically called no-fault insurance or personal injury protection as well as being nominally called liability insurance.  They pay benefits directly to victims.

One of the good models for gun insurance is found in the requirement for a personal injury protection endorsement to car insurance in Rep. Maloney’s own state, New York.  It is codified in New York Regulation 68.   This provides for persons not covered by their own insurance (such as most pedestrians) a requirement for no-fault benefits which are paid directly to first parties (injured persons). 

Suggested New Text for Bill Continue reading

A Progression of Kinds of Insurance for Guns

The purpose of having insurance for victims of gun violence is to provide money for the many needs they have after they suffer from a shooting. The insurance should be structured to pay in the various situations that occur, for the various needs that are faced and in a timely manner. There are lots of kinds of insurance in use today and several ones will be examined in the chapters that follow. Starting with the most basic insurance designed only to protect the buyer of the insurance, we will add features until we see that it is possible to create a system that works to provide the needed protection. We’ll start with the simplest in the progression. Continue reading

Additional Comments B20-170 DC Gun Insurance Bill

Here are the detailed written comments submitted for the record by Tom Harvey, this blogger, after the hearing on the DC gun insurance bill.  The bill is supported by this blog as a start in getting gun insurance enacted.

Comments as PDF

 

 

North Carolina Added to States with Gun Insurance Bills

A bill HB976 has been introduced in the North Carolina Legislature.  It has several gun control provisions including $100,000 in mandatory gun liability insurance.  This insurance goes farther than in most other states by applying to willful acts and to unreported stolen guns.  The bill introduced by Rep’s Luebke, Insko, Harrison and Adams has 7 sponsors so far.  It was introduced on 4/17/13, showing that momentum to deal with gun violence is continuing and that insurance is seen as a part of the solution.  There have now been bills introduced in 9 states and the US House.

How It Could Work

The best system known to this blog for insuring guns to provide for victims, discourage unsafe practices and not excessively burden gun owners is a Top-Down no-fault personal injury protection insurance system similar to the way that motor vehicle insurance currently works for pedestrians in NY state and Michigan.

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Article: “Medical bills can mount for shooting victims”

There is a nice article “Even with health insurance, medical bills can mount for shooting victims,” on InsuranceQuotes.com by Lisa Shidler. It talks about the $2.4 million for treating the people wounded in the Gabrielle Giffords incident and a number of other subjects. Actually, after negotiations with insurance companies the amount to be paid will be reduced to an estimated $565,000 or $43,462 for each of the 13 wounded persons.

The article links to the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation which has a table of costs for gun violence which gives a lot of interesting figures. Of interest to this blog is the average medical cost $49,947 for the medical expenses of each hospital admitted non-fatally injured person. Costs are much lower, $1,146, for persons treated in the ER only. It also gives total medical costs for firearm injuries at $2.88 Billion for 2010 of which almost exactly one half is paid by Medicare or Medicaid. To put it into scale, the total medical costs for firearm injuries is about $10.00 per year for each of the 270 million guns in private hands in the US.

Loss of worktime, which is covered by Personal Injury Protection for motor vehicles in most no-fault states, is about twice as much as the direct medical costs.

Insurance coverage for firearms victims is important in order to insure that the care is actually delivered. These figures show that the overall costs need not be a big burden to gun owners.