Clearing Up The Confusion About Participant Accident Insurance

As an athletic trainer, your student athletes’ recovery is as much a part of your job description as their training and protection. You routinely work to prevent athletic injuries while treating and rehabilitating patients. On top of that, because of your medical training, you are often tasked with handling medical claims and paperwork. You feel you have a pretty clear perspective on everything having to do with your student-athletes’ health and welfare.

But where things can get a little murky is with participant accident insurance. Many athletic departments and school administrations aren’t clear on the role this insurance can play in keeping control of medical expenses. How exactly does participant accident insurance work?

Understanding the Benefits of Participant Accident Insurance

Participant accident insurance, like the plans offered by A-G Administrators insurance, are sometimes confused with general liability plans. The reality is that they are much different. General liability is not an accident or medical insurance policy. It covers claims of negligence or damage by employees or others working under an organization’s direction and are brought against an organization.

Participant Accident Insurance is Not General Liability Insurance

Participant accident insurance is a secondary medical expense coverage that pays benefits if a “participant” such as a student-athlete, a student or a volunteer, is accidentally injured while participating in an event (i.e., practice, a game, or during a school day or while helping at an activity).

By secondary, it means that it is used after primary medical coverage is used to help cover deductibles, copayments, and other out-of-pocket costs that the patient’s primary coverage doesn’t cover. However, when a family may not have primary health insurance coverage, a participant accident plan can help alleviate some of the treatment expenses they’ll face.

A-G offers several types of participant accident insurance

K-12 Student Accident Insurance: These plans cover students and sports teams from an accident’s medical costs. While it’s easy to see how student-athletes suffer from injuries during practices and games, students encounter injury opportunities throughout their day: from the playground to slips and falls in the cafeteria to loading and unloading in the bus zone or carpool lane. In fact, an estimated 2.2 million children ages 14 and under sustain school-related injuries each year. Those medical treatment costs could be mitigated by a participant accident insurance plan.

College/University Accident Insurance: When injuries occur to student-athletes during intercollegiate practices and games, these plans are the secondary plan, paying those medical treatment costs not covered by their primary health insurance. The NCAA requires all student-athletes to carry primary insurance to help keep families from facing real financial straits before reaching its $90,000 catastrophic deductible. However, the out-of-pocket costs left by the primary plan for the families to pay can be quite considerable before reaching the NCAA cap.

A-G Administrators sports insurance specialists work with the many schools that purchase insurance for college athletes to help ensure these terrible financial situations don’t occur.

Voluntary, Mandatory, and Catastrophic Plans: Within the K-12 and College/University programs, A-G offers different ways to provide medical cost protection that fits your school’s budget and goals.

• Mandatory plans, where parents pay the premiums, not the school. These are excess plans that pay secondary to the family’s primary health insurance. Or, if the family doesn’t have primary coverage, they aren’t facing the costs entirely alone.
• Compulsory plans, where the school covers the premium. Families appreciate the care the school shows in providing this additional layer of protection to their child’s health and wellness. (These are usually found at the college/university level.)
• Voluntary plans, which the parent has the option to purchase. These are for student protection outside of school hours or for when participating in activities on or off-campus.

Plus, A-G offers:

Risk Management Solutions: Helping schools and athletic programs and sports risk management is part of our mission at A-G. Among our risk partners is Sparta Science, which provides scientific analysis of a student’s injury, injury risk, and return-to-play timelines. Their reports have been proven to reduce injuries by 21% each year. Read about our other risk solutions for pharmacy costs, cardiac care, risk consulting, and more.

A-G Manages Claims for You

With a benefit that is sure to be appreciated by athletic trainers and school administrators everywhere, A-G handles your participant accident insurance claims. We eliminate the paperwork, red-tape, follow-up, and wasted time with EGBAR, our industry-leading, proprietary claims management system. And, we can also help lower costs by implementing our 40+ provider networks. Discover more with a complimentary EGBAR Demo.

Participant Accident Insurance: Cleared Up With A-G

Now that you know how this A-G Administrators insurance works to protect participants from accident medical expenses, we hope you’ll take a moment and schedule a call with us to see if we can help your program. We’ve been protecting many thousands of students and student-athletes at K-12 schools and colleges and universities for nearly 40 years. So, we can say, with confidence, that there is not a program too small or too big that we can’t help.

It’s easy to get started with an easy, no-obligation conversation about our plans or with an EGBAR demonstration. Just reach out to us today to let us know you’re interested, and one of our insurance specialists will be in touch.

Please don’t hesitate to get started with no obligation now.