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Kevin,
I feel different than you do about Medicaid. As a program I see it as kind of like Social Security for retirement. You pay in and you are entitled to take out, but it's still not a good idea to set yourself up to be dependent only on it if you have other options. And many of us have a chance to purchase insurance that would provide a different and I think better level of care if it turns out we need it.
I don't look down on people who have to use it as their only source of health care and income; I just don't think most of us want to be among them.
I understand the difference between liability insurance and disability insurance, but because individuals can't usually get liability insurance to pay ourselves when we get hurt doing stupid things we elected to do, at least as far as I know; medical insurance and disability insurance combined are probably the next best thing.
And it might be worthwhile for groups to try to offer it. (Although the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure an exclusively college guy pool is probably that a good risk group.) Here's why:
I think sometimes people ARE capable of recognizing if they can take care of themselves, that some bad things happen, and no one is particularly at fault or should pay.
Think about car wrecks. How many people do you know who after having a wreck for which they were partially responsible would insist on suing the other driver if their own insurance company paid for their expenses related to the wreck (and their own insurance company didn't insist on suing to recover some damages)? Sure there'd be some jackasses that would want to sue just to see what they could get, but there's still a number of people who don't operate that way; they think, "my hospital bill is paid and my car is fixed. It's over."
And although I'm not that optimistic about human nature generally, I think the number of people who would try to sue the party with deep pockets who really has very little/no true liability for the bad outcome in other cases might go down if fewer people didn't actually need the money to continue life with a better standard of living than Medicare can provide.*
As I said before, I don't think the family in this case can really expect to collect from the fraternity, nor do I really think they should be able to if things are in fact as the fraternity claims. (I'm interested to know how much not having the required security guards matters if part of the problem was a lack of security. Would the victim even have interacted with the attacker had there been paid security guards? Does violating a university rule actual make them somehow legally liable?)
It's a shame that this guy might be out of luck with the quality of care he receives, but I don't think it makes Sigma Nu obligated to pay for it.
I was thinking more about the former member status too. If he wants to sue the group like this, can he do it as a member of the group? Could he have resigned membership because of the suit?
*I'm not sure about this, but isn't this some of the logic of requiring kids to have health insurance to play school sports? Even though we can make your mom sign waivers of liability to play, we also know that she's going to be less likely to sue if someone else is going to pay to have your broken leg fixed?
Last edited by UGAalum94; 07-04-2007 at 11:03 AM.
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