It’s an increasingly common scenario, a person has health insurance that they have paid for faithfully every month. Everything is fine until a horrible accident occurs out of nowhere. One thinks, “It sucks right now, but at least I have health insurance…” The person finishes the treatment of his injury and is discharged from the hospital to a bright and sunny day. Some 3-4 days later though a dark cloud arrives through the mail. Inside is a bill from the hospital totaling over $15,000 dollars for a treatment that didn’t require surgery with demands that you pay it or else. That’s enough of a shock to send someone to the hospital for a different reason.
Many American citizens encounter this awful scenario and it’s even worse when you actually pay for your health insurance and your expectation of the insurance company paying for your bill isn’t realized. And for what reason?
That’s what a Carson City, Nevada citizen went through when his son was injured riding his bike and went to a hospital to get stitches. Even though he pays his bills regularly, for some reason he was still left with a hospital bill upwards of $15,000.
The reason? Subrogation. A space in law that lets an insurer recoup expenses if a third party was found responsible for an injury. People tend to forget that all insurance companies are out for themselves and are looking for any and every opportunity to protect their assets; health insurance companies are no different. That said, insurance companies claim that subrogation helps keep down premiums by reimbursing them for medical fees.
This caught the eye of a personal injury attorney who has made a name for himself from dealing with subrogation often, specifically in handling car accident cases. The baffling thing here to him was that in this case there was no third party responsible for the very non-unique accident. Even more suspicious was that the denial to pay the bill came before the company received notice about whether anyone else was at fault for the injury.
Again, health insurers are looking to protect their assets at all costs and prevent the passage of high premiums to their clients. This is already accomplished in most personal injury cases where through the negotiative skills of a lawyer, an insurance can take the costs of it’s own back and simply place it onto the back of another insurance company.
Thanks to the negotiative skills of this lawyer however, the insurance company not only paid the medical costs, but they paid less than half as the total amount to be billed was renegotiated as well. In the end, the father of the injured son paid little over $1,000 for the treatment. A reminder that a good personal injury lawyer can change anything. If you have a personal injury case contact a personal injury lawyer, like the office of Frederick workers compensation attorneys.
