Offers To Pay Medical Expenses
An offer to pay medical expenses is an offer of this nature made by a party who might potentially be liable for an injury to another is inadmissible despite its relevance. FRE 409 states:
- Evidence of furnishing or offering or promising to pay medical, hospital, or similar expenses occasioned by an injury is not admissible to prove liability for the injury.
Evidence of an offer to pay medical expenses is inadmissible for the public policy rationale that courts do not want to discourage parties responsible for injuring others from paying for the treatment of those injuries.
Statements made in connection with offers to pay medical expenses, however, are not excluded by FRE 409.
- Example: Plaintiff P slices her lip on a shard of glass that somehow made its way into a salad prepared in defendant D's restaurant. D later visits P in the hospital, puts a bouquet of sunflowers on the table next to the bed where P is sobbing in pain, and exclaims,"I'm so sorry about your injury, it was completely my fault! Please don't worry about your expenses for this hospital visit, I'll write you a check for whatever your bills add up to." In a subsequent personal injury suit brought by P against D in federal court, P may introduce D's statement "I'm so sorry about your injury, it was completely my fault!" as an admission of fault by D.
- Note that in California, California Evidence Code ("CEC") ยง1152(a) renders both offers to pay medical expenses as well as "statements made in negotiation thereof" inadmissible to prove liability. In the above example, therefore, a CA court would prohibit P's introduction of not only the "Please don't worry about your expenses for this hospital visit, I'll write you a check for whatever your bills add up to" statement, but also the "I'm so sorry about your injury, it was completely my fault" statement.
Read more about this topic: Public Policy Doctrines For The Exclusion Of Relevant Evidence
Famous quotes containing the words offers, pay, medical and/or expenses:
“I have often noticed that a bribe ... has that effect—it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Alimony—The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“There may perhaps be a new generation of doctors horrified by lacerations, infections, women who have douched with kitchen cleanser. What an irony it would be if fanatics continued to kill and yet it was the apathy and silence of the medical profession that most wounded the ability to provide what is, after all, a medical procedure.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Good government cannot be found on the bargain-counter. We have seen samples of bargain-counter government in the past when low tax rates were secured by increasing the bonded debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)