I just read a reddit post where someone’s family member intentionally caused them a medical issue that required an ER visit. One of the comments was to press charges, and a reply was to also make the perpetrator pay the medical bills. The country wasn’t specified, so I started thinking:
In a civilized country with health care, would a criminal be required to pay the health costs of the victim they created rather than have it fall upon the taxpayers? Or maybe some sort of program where the criminal has to pay it back later?
Comments
No, we have a single payer healthcare system (Sweden). The max cost for a ER visit would be around 35€.
The criminal might be liable to pay into a special fund that gives money to victims of crime if found guilty in court.
https://www.brottsoffermyndigheten.se/other-languages/english/
Germany
No, we have a healthcare system everyone pays into if they can and depending on the salary. Every health cost for everyone, paying or not, is paid out of this.
Germany and Cyprus have mandatory universal health insurance. That means everyone (within a rounding error) both can and must have health insurance.
Insurances work like insurances work. You pay a standard predictable rate in, the insurance fund pay for all the covered medical procedures you need. Who caused the medical need doesn’t come into play. What matters is whether you need it or not.
There’s some co-pays of course, which can be somewhere between a few or a couple Euros, and capped per year to around a hundred or so Euros.
I can imagine that you can theoretically pursue a civil claim for those costs, but I’m not sure which court will bother for a 150 Euro claim. They’ll most likely tell you to figure it out of court.
Now, what you can definitely pursue with a civil suit is compensation for being rendered incapable of work due to someone else’s negligent or malicious actions. E.g. if you hit let’s say a middle-aged manual worker with your car and you render them unable to walk, it can be argued that you took away their ability to earn a living and it’s conceivable that a court could order you to pay restitution.
People typically have an insurance for this as well, the third party liability insurance, which would cover such claims against you. It’s not mandatory, but it’s very common. Again, an insurance works in that you pay in a predictable amount for the possibility to make a claim at some point in the future for an unpredictable event.
But that’s not what you are asking.
in Germany yes. That’s often part of the civil court case after someone has been convicted by the criminal court. the victims health or care or pension insurance reclaiming their money.
In case of intentional injury, the offender is fully financially liable for all medical costs, pain and suffering compensations, psychological damage and loss of income if the victim cannot work as a result of the injury. The upfront costs will mostly be taken in charge by the victim’s health insurance, which will then start procedures to get reimbursed by the offender. If the offender does not have the means to pay, the public victims compensation fund (taxpayer money) will pay.
health care here in germany is paid by the person having the health insurance (you need to have one if you are a resident in germany by law) and the employer or the state if the person is unemployed.
so, no. criminals do not pay the health care of the victims here in at least germany. the state does pay for the criminals health care tho, as they are still a resident of germany and have to have a health insurance, tho.
also, our justice system does not focus on punishment, but rehabilitation: someone who did crimes must be in a bad place mentally and in prison they are helped to become a productive member of society (again). forcing criminals to pay the health costs of their victims would be in the way of rehabilitation and fall more under the punishment form of justice. and, tbh, rehabilitation seems to be more civilized than punishment.
No, and I wouldn’t be in favor of that, because it’s much more functional to just cover the healthcare uniformly, and let the victim sue for damages – in Czech example, the ER visit cost the patient nothing (or 3.5E if it’s off the business hours), but then the victim can sue for any damages/assault, and that’s completely separate from the medical costs.
They can absolutely be sued for civil damages here for a whole variety of things following on from a criminal case.
Depends on the situation – if you are on disability specifically because of someone’s illegal actions, the state can récup that cost from the wrongdoers insurance usually. You can also pursue someone for damages in court for certain crimes.
As far as I can find partly. Medical costs are paid through insurance, and you can only claim as damages the part that isn’t covered. For example if you have to spend your deductible then you can claim those costs back from the person who injured you. Or if you need physical therapy and don’t have any extra insurance for it or not enough to cover the number of treatments you need. But they won’t have to pay the part that’s covered by your insurance.
I’d honestly find it weird if they did have to pay everything. Because either it’s a small amount that isn’t going to mean much in the grand scheme of annual health care, or it’s a large amount that will cost them a serious amount of money and possibly put them into debt. And that’s not a great situation to put people in when you want to prevent them re-offending.
Bad mentality, OP.
Don’t confuse health costs care with punishment or a payment due to personal injury (lawsuit). Unrelated.
Often, the “costs” of individual treatments are unknown and it can’t be segregated. Everything is aggregated and paid by the tax payer.
There’s a case for a criminal who can afford to pay this cost being required to do so, but in a civilised country, this would not be a direct payment to the victim. A criminal act is an offence against the people, or their representative, as well as against the direct victims. When you are found guilty of crime and you are fined or imprisoned, for example, all the people are the beneficiaries. For this reason, in a civilised country, victims do not press criminal charges. Charges are made by the state as long as there is enough evidence to give the prosecutors a reasonable chance of a win in court. I’d expect they would take into account the willingness of a victim to provide evidence and to speak in court.
In a civilised country, the cost of treatment will be covered by a social healthcare system which will not penalise the victim for such a claim and will leave the victim able to manage, financially. The court could impose a fine on the criminal, and this money returns to the public healthcare system via the state treasury.
Civilised countries do have systems for allowing someone to claim recompense for a wrong that someone has done to them – you sue them, for example – but this is not the same as a criminal case, because the focuses really are the parties claiming to have been wronged and the parties claiming otherwise. It’s received wisdom that it’s usually stupid to try to extract money from people this way if they don’t actually have it.
Ultimately, the victim should receive all possible care regardless of the criminal’s ability to pay. This is a great example of why we have social healthcare. It is a similar principle to the one behind limited liability companies. Sometimes people just do the wrong thing; we set up collective systems to deal with these occasions partly to support the direct victims and partly to reduce the spread of damage.
No that doesn’t really make sense within the danish health care system.
But they can be made to pay for the expenses of the trial and for compensation to the victims loss of income and pain and suffering. If the perpetrator is not able to pay the compensation the state will pay them on their behalf and then try to collect the money from the criminal afterwards.
It is sometimes debated whether inducing a large debt on criminals is reasonable given their general ability to pay and the potential less than positive consequences for recidivism.
Yes, they should. Also they pay for prison – heating, food, electricity, cleaning.
If a criminal dont have enough money it dont appear from thin air though. Criminal who work in prison will pay a % of wage from prison, otherwise his property will be arrested and sold (1 last bed shoud remain) and after prison he will pay % of wage in freedom until its done.
Yes. and it’s a punishment more feared than prison. if you are 18 and cause a car accident by DUI, you better hope the injured party is already very old, because you will be paying for the rest of their lives. it can be as much as the average child support payment. can be more, can be less.
I know young people who just gave up on their education or career, because no matter how much they earned, most of it would go to the victim anyways.
All the typical child support evasion tactics are used here. And people sue for similar things: second income not published, working unter the table, inhertances that could be monetised….
BUT: there IS an insurance for this! it’s just not mandatory, so not everybody has it. Especially young dumb 18 year olds, who can barely pay off their car and opted for the cheapest insurance package. GOOD parents will make their kids take out the more expensive one.
No, and that would prohibitively be expensive to administrate although morally just.
This is either a very uninformed or a bad faith question, which has been answered/pushed back on by others