Oregon Casualty Study Guide

Casualty is where national material compresses hardest, and Oregon punishes it twice. “Oregon has $15,000 PIP” is how most candidates carry a schedule of five separately capped benefits; “Oregon has a state fund” is how most carry a market that is fully competitive. This exam is written on the halves those shortcuts drop.

The PIP schedule — five benefits, five caps, four clocks

Oregon is a tort state with a mandatory add-on personal injury protection benefit (ORS 742.520). PIP pays the insured’s own medical and wage costs regardless of fault, but the right to sue the at-fault driver survives intact — this is not no-fault. The schedule sits in one subsection, ORS 742.524(1):

Medical — $15,000 in the aggregate, for expenses “incurred within two years after the date of the person’s injury” (paragraph (a)). Wage loss — 70% of loss of income from work during disability, capped at $3,000 per month and 52 weeks in the aggregate (paragraph (b)). Essential services — $30 per day for up to 52 weeks, for a person not engaged in a remunerative occupation (paragraph (c)). Funeral — $5,000, for expenses “incurred within one year after the date of the person’s injury” (paragraph (d)). Child care — $25 per day, beginning only after the initial 24 hours of hospitalisation, capped at $750 (paragraph (e)).

Five caps, four different ways of expressing time. The medical window is two years; the funeral window, three paragraphs below it, is one. Child care alone is gated by hospitalisation rather than by a deadline.

The 14-day qualifying period, and the two benefits it touches

Wage loss and essential services apply only where the disability “continues for at least 14 days” (ORS 742.524(1)(b), (1)(c)). The statute frames this as a condition on entitlement rather than as a lag before payment starts, so read it as a threshold: cross it and the benefit exists, fall short and it never begins.

What matters for the exam is its reach: those two benefits and nothing else. Medical pays from the first dollar. A claimant disabled for ten days is an item asking which two benefits fall away — and the answer is not “all of them.”

Uninsured motorist is mandatory, and underinsured lives inside it

ORS 742.502(1) does not offer, it requires: “Every motor vehicle liability policy… shall provide in the policy or by indorsement… uninsured motorist coverage.”

Limits move only one way. The default is that UM equals the bodily injury liability limits; lower limits require a named insured’s written election, and the floor is the ORS 806.070 minimums — 25/50/20 in the familiar shorthand (ORS 742.502(2)(a)). The same paragraph then does the thing candidates miss: “Uninsured motorist coverage must include underinsurance coverage.” Underinsured protection is a component of UM in Oregon, not a companion product — there is no separate UIM to buy or to reject.

Workers’ compensation — compulsory, and competitive

ORS 656.017(1) frames the employer’s duty as maintaining assurance with the Director of DCBS, satisfied by qualifying either as a carrier-insured employer or as a self-insured employer under ORS 656.407.

Oregon is not a monopolistic state. SAIF Corporation is “an independent public corporation” that may insure an Oregon employer “as fully as any private insurance carrier” (ORS 656.751(1); ORS 656.752(1)), and separately the mandatory carrier for state employees (ORS 656.017(2)). A candidate who hears “state fund” and infers exclusivity marks SAIF as the only door. It is one of three.

Temporary total disability pays 66 2/3% of wages, bounded in the same subsection by a maximum of 133% of the state average weekly wage and a minimum of the lesser of 90% of wages a week or $50 a week — the “whichever amount is less” on the floor being the phrase candidates drop (ORS 656.210(1)). The waiting period is expressly in calendar days: no disability payment for temporary disability “suffered during the first three calendar days after the worker leaves work or loses wages,” unless total disability then continues for 14 consecutive days or the worker is admitted as a hospital inpatient within 14 days of first onset (ORS 656.210(3)).