If you have a car in Thailand, it has to have a minimum of third party insurance, via an insurance scheme which is, I believe, run by the government. This will cost you around 800 baht and provides a degree of cover should you ever injure other people. It will also, provide a contribution of 15,000 baht to your medical costs, a fact I was unaware of because I never planned on being injured…..
I also had fully comprehensive insurance, a fact that did not relieve me from the obligation to purchase the government third party offering. This insurance, as well as hopefully reimbursing me for my destroyed car at some point, once they have removed their fingers from their bums, also contributed 100,000 baht to my hospital bill.
These two contribution left only a balance of around 30,000 baht to be picked up by my medical insurance, and nothing to be paid by me (apart from suffering for a while).
Of course, these insurance companies don’t just hand out the money, they need evidence that you have been injured and are not just lying in the hospital for the fun of it. My car insurance company had a representative on the scene from the beginning and he must have got some great photos of my scalp being sewn back on to help justify my hospital stay. But the government scheme did not send their man round until the third day, by which time it was more difficult to see what was wrong with me.
He came into my room, camera ready, and tried to find something to photograph. My shattered vertebrae was well hidden, my bashed up ribs were unseen below a T-shirt, and even my sewn up scalp was looking like nothing more than a rather badly combed hairstyle. But I had one leg sticking out of the blankets and there was a healing scar on an ankle, so he photographed that. It was a scar from a recent windsurfing mishap.
Then he gave me a form to complete describing he accident. This was somewhat of a challenge given that I have no recollection of the event. Nothing daunted, I launched into a colourful narrative which had a central theme involving a rampant giraffe in the outside lane and a distracting bevy of bar girls in a passing bus. In a homage to Blackadder, I included the Balinese Goddess of Plenty as a member of the attending police force and signed off the fabrication with a flourish. This seemed to satisfy the government agent, and my slightly injured ankle and rampaging giraffe ensured that funds were forthcoming the following day.
Comments 🔗
2008-11-03| FrogBlogger saysI was overtaken by an elephant on the motorway the other day (have the photo to prove it) so the giraffe story is quite plausible…
Sounds like a bad one ….
2008-11-04| Spike saysI would love to see the photo….
2008-11-04| Audemars saysI can smell a new MX-5 coming out of a Mazda showroom in the near future bro.
2008-11-04| FrogBlogger saysI’ve just blogged about it, (“Jumbo Load”) … there are a couple of photos.
2008-11-04| Spike saysAudemars, Not a new one cos they are all AT now, but a nice shiny used one with MT…. if you know of any.
Frogblogger So you have, nice capture. Maybe I hit some elephant shit?