If you have been injured by someone else, either in a car accident or perhaps a slip and fall at premises, you may have found yourself in the emergency room, a doctor’s office, or urgent care with questions about how the insurance claims process should be handled. See this important video to learn what to be wary of when it comes to healthcare billing practices. At Tobias & Comer Law, LLC, we are injury attorneys who are experts in insurance practices and in dealing with insurance companies, so we know exactly how to navigate through the insurance process. If you have been affected by predatory billing practices, give us a call for a free consultation 251-432-5001 or schedule online.
Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Bryan Comer with the law firm of Tobias & Comer Law, LLC. One of the main questions that we get from people who come in for the very first time is how things work in terms of medical bills. If somebody’s been in a car wreck or injured by a defective product oftentimes the medical bills can be quite high, and I want to take a minute and explain how that process works.
If you have been injured and you have private health insurance, that private health insurance if it’s accepted by the provider whether it be a hospital, a doctor’s office, primary care doctor or specialist, or even an urgent care, then typically a private health insurance company is considered primary and will pay the bill in full, less any kind of copayment or deductible. And oftentimes a private health insurance company will have some kind of a contract in place with the provider so they’ll pay a percentage of the full bill and then once the deductible is met or the co-payment is made then the bill is satisfied in full and sometimes that can be forty percent or 40 cents on the dollar, sometimes even less than that. In addition to private health insurance, if you’ve been in an automobile wreck, there is a coverage known as medical payments coverage and so if you’ve purchased that coverage through your carrier and it’s it typically exists on most policies then it also provides additional coverage up to the policy limits despite who is at fault so even if you caused a wreck but if you were injured then the medical payments coverage is there and that’s to help reimburse you for things like your co-payments your deductibles or if there’s some out of network charge that you had to pay out of pocket. in addition to that there could be additional insurance that’s available if your injury was caused by someone else and that’s known as liability insurance and Alabama requires drivers to carry liability insurance at a minimum of twenty-five thousand dollars per car and so that’s to provide coverage if you cause a personal injury to someone else and so that’s an additional policy that could be available but even if you were injured another way say not a car wreck but instead, you were injured at somebody’s premises from an unreasonably dangerous or defective condition or if a dangerous product causes you injury, there is additional liability insurance coverage that can be there to help compensate you for your injury.
Now one troubling thing that we’ve seen is companies that are hired by some local health care providers that are trying to maximize the recovery for the health care provider whether it be for an emergency room visit, whether it be for a doctor’s visit, if these companies like RevClaims and there are others that we’ve seen if they find out that you were injured by someone else they try to go around the private health insurance to receive not a reduced amount of the bill but the full bill. And we’ve even seen practices out there where they’ll file a hospital lien and send you the notice of a lien when you’ve been to the ER for a broken arm as a result of being in a car wreck or a more serious injury from say a defective product, and the lien oftentimes scares our client, and they call saying what’s the lien there for, why is this lien in place, or they’ll ask I have insurance how come I have a lien that’s been filed?
That’s why it’s really important to obtain representation from a lawyer who knows how to navigate this process at an early stage. The lawyers at Tobias & Comer Law, LLC have over a combined seventy years of experience helping people who’ve been hurt by someone else’s negligence or wanton conduct. We understand how to circumvent, how to bypass companies who are attempting to sidestep your health insurance to make sure that it is followed properly and that we maximize the recovery for our clients, and it’s really important to retain somebody who does know how to operate in that area, how to how to navigate that field. We’re real people who help real people. Anytime you have a question whether it be from one of these billing practices or if you’ve been injured by someone else, pick up the phone call us at 251-432-5001 for a no-cost consultation. There’s never any fee unless we have a recovery for you.