Personal accident cover for everyday life (France, GAV)
An individual policy compensating bodily injury suffered in private life, home and leisure accidents, medical accidents, assaults, when no liable third party pays, under ordinary tort-law rules.
Most serious bodily injuries in private life are compensated by no one. A fall from a stepladder, a near-drowning, a kitchen burn have no one liable, and social security reimburses only medical care and part of income. Personal accident cover for everyday life fills this gap. It covers the insured and family against home, leisure and sports accidents, medical accidents, assaults and natural or technological disasters, outside road accidents, governed by the Badinter law, and work accidents. Its distinctive feature is how it compensates: not a fixed lump sum, as in classic personal accident insurance, but compensation under ordinary tort-law rules, head by head, on the model of the Dintilhac classification: lost income, home adaptation costs, carer, pain and suffering, disfigurement. The industry has defined a baseline contract, with a common specification. The trigger is a threshold of permanent impairment, often 5, 10 or 30 percent depending on the plan: below it, nothing is paid. The product is not widely held, even though it covers a major share of the serious accidents people actually suffer.
Hypothetical case: a father falls from a ladder while trimming a hedge and is left paraplegic, with a 70 percent permanent impairment rate. No third party is liable; his everyday-life accident cover compensates him under ordinary tort law, home adaptation, lost income, carer, for a total of 1.8 million euros.
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