Do Not Let Medical Bills Pile Up After an Accident

If you are or were injured in an accident, your medical providers may be looking to get more money then they would be getting from insurance. In Illinois, the law allows medical providers to file what is a called a lien with the car insurance companies involved in the accident. That lien requires the car insurance companies to pay the medical providers one hundred percent of the amount that they bill.

If you have ever looked closely at a medical bill, there is an amount charged that is determined by the medical providers themselves and often times the amount charged for service is highly inflated, sometimes it is ten times more than what the insurance, Medicare or Medicaid actually pays for the services.

The more money that has to be paid out to medical providers means that less money would be coming to you for the pain and suffering and lost wages from an accident. Say for example that the medical providers Billed One Hundred Thousand Dollars ($100,000.00) for your medical treatment from an accident and our office was able to secure an award of Five Hundred Thousand Dollars ($500,000.00). If no car insurance, health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid paid those bills, you would be paying the full One Hundred Thousand Dollars ($100,000.00) out of your award back to the medical provider.

Our office strives to require the medical providers to follow the law and bill insurance when required. Any no-fault car insurance policy that is accessible to you, which can include any policy that you own or is related to the vehicle you are driving independent of whether you are driving your own vehicle or that of someone else, is the primary insurance. Under Illinois law, our office is able to secure deductions from what is required to be paid back to the no-fault company out of an award in any injury case so that more money goes to you. If that no-fault coverage is either not available or exhausted, our office does everything available under the law to require health insurance, Medicare or Medicaid to pay a fraction of what the medical providers bill so that more money goes to you. Private health insurance is required to pay at that point, but as it pertains to Medicare and Medicaid, in many instances the law allows the medical providers to choose whether to see if they can get their full bill paid out of the award or from Medicare of Medicaid. Our office has been very successful in negotiating with the providers to either compel them to bill Medicare or Medicaid or accept a fraction of their bill to provide you with more money for your accident case.

I do not believe all injury attorneys focus on the medical bills because the payment of those bills is ultimately the responsibility of the client, but our office disagrees with that approach and we make it our problem to solve and we do the best we can to minimize the amount of money that goes to the medical providers unnecessarily .

Please contact us if you have an injury matter promptly after it occurs so we have the best opportunity to assist in reducing the bills and getting you as much money as possible for your injury case.

Steven J. Greeley