Pennsylvania Personal Injury Attorney Discusses Full Tort and Limited Tort

In Pennsylvania should you purchase full tort or limited tort coverage? Pennsylvania personal injury attorney David Ross offers his view on limited tort and full tort coverage. Limited Tort v. Full Tort - In Pennsylvania, you have the ability to choose either limited tort or full tort coverage for your automobile. This election of coverage type has far reaching consequences in the event that you are involved in an accident.
With a limited tort policy, you are generally limited to recovering for economic damages. Or in other words you can only recover for medical bills, lost wages, and car repairs. That means that in general you cannot recover for pain and suffering if you elected limited tort coverage unless your injury is "serious." Sounds reasonable, right? The problem with limited tort coverage starts with the definition of a “serious” injury. A serious injury is an injury that results in death, serious impairment of a bodily function or permanent serious disfigurement. But what does it mean to you? Is your injury serious or not? I can tell you from personal experience that there is often a disagreement between injured persons and the insurance company over, for example, whether the injury to your shoulder is a serious impairment of a bodily function. Many, many cases end up in litigation because the insurance company refuses to acknowledge that an injury is serious. The tragedy is that the focus becomes not justice for the injured party, but whether the insurance company can get away with paying only a little bit by convincing a judge that the injury is not serious as defined by the law.

On the other hand, a full tort policy does not have these complications. With full tort coverage you have the right to pursue compensation for all of your losses — including pain and suffering. There is no artificially imposed limit on the amount that you can recover. The underlying philosophy of our system is that a person should be made whole – that is that they should be put back in the position that they were in before they were injured by the negligence of the Defendant. Since we don’t have time machines, the law provides the ability to seek monetary damages for all of the components of an injury, including medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering and mental and emotional distress. Selecting limited tort takes away your ability to be made whole again. For these reasons our firm highly recommends that you purchase a full tort policy.