A Word About Medical Bills After A Motorcycle Accident

I want to talk to you about your medical bills after an accident. Usually they are significant, sometimes enormous. The bills start to trickle in in the weeks following the accident. You get bills from the paramedics at the scene, the emergency room where you were treated, the emergency room physicians, the radiologists who took the x-rays, CT scans or MRI’s, the hospital where you’re treated, the surgeon, the follow-up doctors, the physical therapist, and other providers. If you have medical insurance you rest easier because most of the bills will be paid and you will be responsible for deductibles and co-pays. If you don’t have insurance you’ll become well acquainted with the billing departments of the medical providers or their collection agencies. In either case a little information can help ease your worries.

Let’s talk about when you have health insurance. If you have health insurance you will often be obligated to repay your medical insurance company for what they have paid to your doctors and other medical providers as a result of your accident. This seems unjust to most people because they assume that is what you pay premiums for. The obligation to repay your medical insurance company when you are injured by a third party is contractual and it is written in almost all medical insurance policies. When we resolve a case either through settlement or verdict we spend a lot of time working on reducing the obligation to the insurance company by employing various legal strategies depending on what type of policy it is and how the policy is written.

If you don’t have insurance there is a whole host of other issues we deal with. Obviously, without insurance you are responsible for the bills. Many hospitals and physicians will offer discounts on the bill to the patient, and sometimes government services such as Medicaid or the local county may extend aid. In most cases the medical bills remain unresolved and must be dealt with at the end of case. As with cases involving insurance companies, we employ various legal strategies to reduce and sometimes eliminate the medical obligation depending on who the obligation is owed to, the amount of the obligation, and when the case is resolved. Your lawyer’s ability to reduce your medical bills will impact what your ultimate recovery from a motorcycle accident will be. As an example, two weeks ago we resolved an insurance bill of $340,000 for $500. It made a great difference to our client’s recovery, and gave her significant peace of mind knowing that her bills were behind her. That’s an extreme example, but it shows we’re pretty good at what we do.

When you hire the motorcycle attorneys at Motorcycle Advocates we analyze your medical obligations and create an individualized strategy to resolve them so that you can concentrate on healing. We have vast experience dealing with all types of medical providers and insurance companies.